STOMP or XMPP - Over websocket

Question

I am working on a project which involves real time chat (messaging, including group chats).

I have worked with websockets before, So I started working on this using spring-websockets and I did some reading about what is the best way to implement it. Then I came across STOMP (as a sub-protocol for websockets)and as there is direct support for STOMP in spring it was bit easy to achieve what I was supposed to do.

But my doubt is as far as my understanding STOMP and XMPP are similar protocols(messaging protocols) but I could not find any questions/blogs where the differences are explained and why somebody would prefer one over another?

It will be really helpful if somebody explains how these two protocols differ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

As the successor of Jabber, XMPP is more focused on instant messaging instead of STOMP. XMPP is an extensible protocol and could be used for other purposes, but there are plenty of built-in mechanism and implementations regarding IM. STOMP offers a more general mechanism and "message" here refers a broad meaning.

Let's say you choose STOMP for your project. Then you will probably need to define basic messages for certain scenarios (peer-to-peer, group chat) which are already offered by XMPP.

To compare two protocols;

• STOMP message is carried as plain text (as its name indicates) whereas XMPP is structured as XML.
• STOMP connections can be established via TCP or WebSockets. XMPP supports TCP or HTTP (WebSocket standard is also propopsed).
• In Java world, Spring has the ability to talk STOMP and it's very easy to implement. However, XMPP support can be added by adding 3rd Party APIs (i.e. Smack)