Create Google Talk in AIR

Ever want to communicate to today’s most popular instant messengers, such as Google Talk, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. Now you can! Seesmic-AS3-XMPP is an all new XMPP 1.0 compliant library for Flash 9+. It features an easy to understand event-driven style, starttls support (using a modified Hurlant TLS lib), and a plugin based architecture for easy extending.

Author, Nathan Fritz is a leading expert in working with XMPP (Jabber) servers. He has created other language libraries that connect to XMPP servers. And now he offers it in AS3. This library doesn’t come out of the box offering all the features other library packages, like XIFF offer. But it has been engineered to support anything you would like through an open-ended plugin architecture.

The libraries uses a true open XML connection. It also overcomes several hurdles other AS3 XMPP libraries could not address which allow you to easily connect to IMs such as Google Talk with a small amount of code. The API is friendly and minimalist and the awesome thing about it is when you run the AIR demo, you can type in your credentials for Google Talk (for example) and start chatting to your friends through it. That is pretty awesome!

You can build both Flash/Flex/AIR instant messengers that can communicate with any IM system using these libraries. Some will require you to have a Jabber server like OpenFire which is what I use because it is easy to setup and manage.

If you try to run the AS3 code and connect to Google Talk from only Flash or Flex directly, it won’t work (yet). This is because Google doesn’t have a crossdomain policy on their server. Hopefully, this will change in the future, but unti then there are a couple of options…create a proxy on your own server (with your own crossdomain policy), build it in AIR only, or wait.

The code is open-source and you can find it here on Google code:
http://code.google.com/p/seesmic-as3-xmpp/