GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 746567
substitute Facebook XMPP by http://libraries.io/npm/facebook-chat-api
Last modified: 2015-04-08 16:13:56 UTC
On April 30, 2015, Facebook will discontinue its XMPP server [1]. No substitute has been presented. This bug intends to query the developers of the viability of reusing the project "facebook-chat-api", actively maintained, as part of supporting Facebook chat past April 30. Futher alternatives are explored, without much success, at Stackoverflow [3]. [1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat [2] http://libraries.io/npm/facebook-chat-api [3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23988889/replacement-for-facebook-chat-api-in-v2-0 Thanks in Advance for your time.
http://libraries.io/npm/facebook-chat-api does not say how it works underneath. How does it work?
The key issue is: "No substitute has been presented." Unless we get an answer to comment 1 , I don't see how we can do this. In any case, the XMPP implementation lives in telepathy-gabble, so even if we decided to do this, work needs to happen in telepathy-gabble or empathy. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 745004 ***
telepathy-gabble is XMPP right? Would have to be dropped entirely. Some new module called telepahy-facebook would need to be implemented. If one wishes not to use facebook-chat-api (Javascript), one can use a C language implementation: bitlbee appears to have a working implementation in C language, since «jgeboski made bitlbee-facebook in response to this. It connects through MQTT, and also supports group chats. It's not 100% stable yet, but it's usable.» ( https://github.com/jgeboski/bitlbee-facebook/tree/master/facebook )
I still don't understand how this works. Which server side API / protocol is being used to implement these?
Guessing by the filenames, I would say it uses JSON over HTTP. I don't know MQTT internals so I don't know how it fits here. MQTT was used in the past by the mobile messenger (and presumably, still is). Pidgin also has code from 2010 which uses that connection [I think], available at https://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/ (unchanged clone at https://github.com/pedrogfrancisco/pidgin-facebookchat )