Presence and Store Help

This may not be necessarily something that would be built into Openfire, but I’m wondering if those with experience would be able to help me out with solving a problem.

I’m working on an application for Twitter. The twitter api allows you to receive messages from twitter@twitter.com. It will send all the updates from twitter as they happen as a message for each update.

I want to be able to store all of these messages so that the app can process them in batches. The only problem is that twitter@twitter.com will not send the updates if it sees that your user is offline. Therefore I can’t take advantage of having everything dump to the offline table which was my original plan.

Is there a process I can run on my server or with my Openfire server that will show my user as ‘online’ while collecting and storing all the messages it receives?

It really seems that I just need a Jabber client that’s command-line and works in Red Hat/Unix. Is there such a thing?

Thanks!

I had the same problem while trying to use Openfire with the new Twitter Jabber API. I’ve written a small command line client in Perl (using the XMPP2 class from CPAN) to switch the presence indicator to “online”.

That made the Twitter public timeline flow from Twitter to my Openfire server and into the Perl client. But my problem remains: the information is not stored in the offline table, and the Perl client only sees the body part of the messages and not the meta information which is in XML/Atom format. The offline table stores the whole message including all XML data, so that would be ideal.

So the ideal would be to have a user that is continuously “online” without any client being connected, and still have the incoming messages for that user stored in the offline table for further processing.

Maybe this is possible with the Enterprise version, but I’ll have to wait for that since trial licenses cannot be requested anymore. I could also study the source code and patch it to have an offline user “fake” being online.

I think this issue will become important in the future because Openfire is IMHO the best platform to receive and store massive amounts of Twitter messages.

I’m trying to do the exact same thing, ran into the same problem, and I’m thinking of the same solution - have a little server-side client that stays logged in but doesn’t download any messages.

Has anyone done this, or found an alternative?