(With my both hands up).
After much research I have found that Openfire is apparently a good tool to write chat applications against using smack library. I don’t think I understand why we use openfire (for my purpose anway).
My application will (hopefully) have some users registered. I would like them to be able to send messages to each other (chat experience would be great). From the spike I’ve done, I can create users in OF and send message to another user who is also registered to the OF server (verfied by using Spark client). The message sent back using the Spark client is received by my ChatMessage listener. All good so far.
But this perhaps where I am a bit lost. The message I received from the user using Spark client now needs to be sent down to my client (which I believe I will either need to push or the client pulls). I could very easily store each message sent by the users in a DB and get the client to request for messages sent to them. If I am to doing this, I don’t see why I would use openfire.
Can anyone pls explain how openfire is supposed to be used.
AD