Garret Heaton

Experimental support for XMPP/Jabber

By Garret Heaton | 10 months ago | 9 Comments |

XMPP (aka Jabber) is a common chat protocol that HipChat runs on, as do many other services like Google Talk and Facebook Chat. Although our clients have always used it, we never revealed how to connect with your own client. Today we’re happy to change that and announce experimental support for any client that speaks XMPP.

Unfortunately no other chat programs have all the awesome features we do, so if you use another client you won’t have file sharing, inline image previews, @mentions, and a few other things. But we don’t want to be a proprietary system and realize that some of you would rather miss out some features and be able to connect with your favorite client, so here you go.

Of course this also means that you can write more advanced bots that sit in your rooms and respond to commands. Here’s a very basic example using node.js: hipchat_bot.js

Full details on our XMPP/Jabber support page.

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  • Jordan Ritter

    Wrote a quick ruby-based bot. Enjoy!

    https://gist.github.com/941931

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    Cool! Sucks you have to override that class just to set the history maxstanzas. I bet we could have our server default to not sending history though. Also, you should use ‘chat.hipchat.com’ for the host so you’re not always hitting that one server (which may go away at some point).

  • Jordan Ritter

    That would be awesome! LMK if/when..

    Updated the gist to use ‘chat.hipchat.com’ instead.

    Cheers!

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    If you use the resource “bot” in your JID when connecting then the history won’t be sent to you. Unfortunately I can’t disable it by default because many clients seem to assume its sent without explicitly requesting it. Hopefully this fix works until we start doing more advanced client detection.

  • http://www.twitter.com/tarpara Viral Tarpara

     Great timing with this announcement, we almost decided against a larger HipChat pilot due to lack of XMPP/Jabber interop.  Now can continue with our pilot!  Very happy!

  • Anonymous

    I’ve released the initial version of a Python based Hipchat bot here (also available via pypi): https://github.com/1stvamp/hippybot

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    Awesome, thanks! I linked to it from our support page.

  • Kevin Moore

    Is there a way to disable Jabber/alternate client support for hipchat from an administrative level?  Although it is a great feature, it may pose a security issue as a user’s jabber client may now be keeping a local log of chat history.

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    This isn’t an option currently. Our clients actually use XMPP too but we’ll keep this idea in mind for the future.