OneSocialWeb: more than Jabber for Apps

written on Friday, 30th April, 2010

Almost a month ago, the presentation of OneSocialWeb at the android developers conference droidcon.be was one of the most interesting talks there. Recently the XMPP-centric framework has gone open source.

Last year a group of fellow students and myself were tasked with creating an android applications to organize meetings spontaneously (think something like doodle, only mobile and more short term). At that time we were thinking about using XMPP for real time communication, but were hesitant because of the time this would cost us to implement. In the end we used a traditional REST-based web service rather than a peer-to-peer system. Luckily there already is an effort underway which is called OneSocialWeb, funded by the telco provider Vodafone. It allows people to work together on Java-objects using XMPP.

This means that all the work that has to do with XMPP protocol handling and conflict management will be handled by this abstraction layer, while we developers can focus on delivering useful application. You could use this for simple things like associating chat conversations with arbitrary objects in your application. You could also try to model your entire application domain around this collaboration: In his presentation at droidcon Laurent Eschenauer demonstrated this using a collaborative shopping list where each participant could check off items, notifying the others immediately.

The Android platform with its services-model might really help in getting this concept to work, as XMPP protocol handling could be handled by one central service, dispatching updates to any interested Activities. This could well become the bidirectional, decentralized alternative to Apple’s Mobile Push service.