Build your own meebo.. or even better!

After being dunk from an office party, i decided to sleep over at my desk rather than go home but couldnt fall asleep. So i decided i'll do some far off experiment Txtdomain once again.. i set my goal to replicating Meebo (or atleast some part of it); don't get me wrong here, I dont hate Meebo. I think it's very cool and im always using it whenever im not at the office.

To cut my work short i Googled, found Jabberd2 easy enough as my Jabber/IM server and a few more scripts downloaded to support bindings to other transport. Then i caught a snag when I tried using purely PHP and Apache to connect to Jabberd2 so i decided to go Java with Tomcat since i was already able to make a Jabber Bot earlier with JivesSoftware.

It took me a while on how to handle cross server authentication without sacrificing security, so ive settled for one time embeddable javascript to pass the data plus it is protected by a session based login. Since i freely control the passwords i made them dynamic so Txtdomain will pick a random password every time a user logs-in then change it to something else again when the user logs-out. I could have deleted the Jabber account but i wanted the users to recieve offline messages as well.

In the end it took me 15 hours to finish the experiment and embed in into our Txtdomain site. I'll try to write a howto later when i have the time, i will also try using eJabberd instead of Jabberd2.

Check out the screen shot, SMS to IM and even to GoogleTalk! Now to think of it, it does sounds more like a Chikka competitor rather than for Meebo :P