Google Code-in

This beginner task will help you get familiar with the chat protocol we use in many of our tools. This is valuable task for students planning to work on our webchat, game networking, and game hosting tools.

The chat protocol we use is an IETF Internet standard called XMPP (which stands for eXtensible Message and Presence Protocol). See xmpp.org for more details.

To get started, login to gci.copyleftgames.org (and verify if you haven't already done so), click the Home tab, and then open the Console directly below the chat room box.

Now send "Hi" to the chat room, if you scroll to the bottom of the console window you'll notice something like this in green (green is what your client sent, red is receive):

Notice the chat message "Hi" is inside , and is inside .

Now use the console tool to send a chat room message with an added empty inside message (next to, not inside ). Chat clients will ignore your added because they don't understand it, but mentors and other students watching their console will see it in the XML. This demonstrates the "extensible" nature of the protocol and is how new features are added without breaking older software.

If you send invalid XML the server might disconnect you, just reload the page to reconnect to the server and try again.