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Welcome to the directmessaging wiki!

This project is a proof-of-concept that demonstrates how realtime communication could work on the web.

Included is two Flash Builder projects (with a binary distribution found under downloads)

• DirectMessaging
  • An AIR application that receives messages sent via a web page. Also sends messages that ends up on a web page.
• DirectMessagingBridge
  • Produces an embeddable SWF that is the bridge between the web page and the message broker. Included in the subfolder “web” is the message broker service and an HTML document which loads the bridge.

The message broker, flashbroker.py, is a Python script with a bunch of dependencies:

$ easy_install twisted
$ easy_install stompservice
$ easy_install simplejson
$ python flashbroker.py

simplejson is not really a dependency if you are running python2.6+ since it is included with the json module. The script has to be adapted for this, though.

NOTICE

Be very aware that running flashbroker.py outside of localhost will expose a VERY open message broker. Nothing bad can really happen, except perhaps your bandwidth being utilized for purposes you did not intend :)

Currently, everything defaults to running on localhost but index.html can be published anywhere (not tested extensively). If, for some reason, you want to run outside localhost remember to allow connections on port 61613 if you have a firewall running.

Given that flashbroker.py does not give any errors (feel free to report them) you should be able to browse to wherever you published index.html, send a few messages and then start the AIR client. Pending messages will then be deliviered to the AIR client and realtime communication commences!

A more in-depth discussion on this architecture and possible scenarios will follow at a later date :)