How Google Talk server history pulling is implemented?

6
votes

Google GTalk clients (web, android, windows) have great ability to suck conversation history from server, even though conversations were done an another jabber client.

  • What jabber (XMPP) functionality (XEP) is used for that or is it some custom thing?
  • Why no other XMPP client (non Google) has this ability?

P.S. It is programming question, because I am asking about specific XMPP functionality.

3
xmppgoogle-talk
They probably just log every statement sent through XMPP. They want to know everything anyway... – Glen Solsberry

3 Answers

4
votes

It is possible that this is done using message archiving. See XEP-0136: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html

(And with regard to the other answer, this is supported by ejabberd: http://www.ejabberd.im/mod_archive)

1
votes

Its a property of XMPP server not XMPP/Jabber client. All conversation happens through XMPP Server. So If server wants it can store all the history. As far as I know there is no open source XMPP server which can store history.

Google has it all.

I am not sure, but I think there is no specific XEP for storing history on server.

1
votes

Server side XEP-0136 (message archiving) can be done with ejabberd + mod_archive (mod_archive_odbc variant with sql backend, for better perfomance) or with openfire server with open archive plugin.

Client side, for XEP-0136 I use vacuum im, http://code.google.com/p/vacuum-im/ , it's open-source and cross platform.