unam3/kaiwa

A modern XMPP Web client

Kaiwa

Kaiwa is an open source web client for XMPP.

Our production server is http://chat.jabber.ru

Alpha version is always hosted on http://kaiwa.fornever.me (warning: there may be highly unstable code there, you're recommended to use test accounts with this server).

Kaiwa is a fork of Otalk, a prototype application created by &yet.

Installing

First of all, clone the repository, install the dependencies and configure the application:

$ git clone https://github.com/ForNeVeR/kaiwa.git
$ cd kaiwa
$ npm install
$ cp dev_config.example.json dev_config.json # and edit the file

After that compile the application:

$ npm run compile

And start the server:

$ npm start

For the development purposes you may use

$ npm run devel-nix # or devel-win for Windows environment

It will continously monitor the src directory for changes and recompile application on any change.

It you want to publish the compiled application somewhere else, feel free to drop the public directory to any web server. You could need to setup MIME types, please consult src/server.js if you need to.

Note: If you're running your own XMPP server, and aren't using something like HAProxy to terminate SSL, then you might get errors in certain browsers trying to establish a WebSocket connection because the XMPP server is requesting an optional client certificate which makes the browser terminate the socket. To resolve that, visit the XMPP over Websocket URL directly (eg, example.com:5281/xmpp-websocket for Prosody) so that a client cert choice can be made. After that, the Kaiwa client should connect fine.

Configuration

Application configuration is taken from dev_config.json file.

server.sasl is optional parameter that can be used to configure the authentication scheme. It can be a single string or a priority list. The default priorities as defined by stanza.io are ['external', 'scram-sha-1', 'digest-md5', 'plain', 'anonymous'].

You may enable XMPP pings by setting the server.keepalive.interval (time between ping attempts) and server.keepalive.timeout (timeout to close the connection if pong was not received); both of these are in seconds. If server.keepalive is not defined, then XMPP ping will use the default settings (with interval of 5 minutes).

Set server.securePasswordStorage to false if you want the users to save their passwords in the browser local storage. In secure mode with SCRAM authentication enabled Kaiwa will try to save only salted data. The secure mode will not work with digest-md5 authentication.

What's included?

Kaiwa comes with support for:

Message History Syncing

Using Message Archive Management (MAM, XEP-0313), your conversations can be archived by your server and pulled down by the Kaiwa client on demand.

Active Chat Syncing

Ever used multiple IM clients at once, or swapped clients, and end up with disjointed conversations? Using Message Carbons (XEP-0280) all of your active conversations will be synced to your Kaiwa client (and vice versa if you other clients support carbons too).

Reliable Connections

Sometimes you just lose your Internet connection, but with Stream Mangagement XEP-0198 your current session can be instantly resumed and caught up once you regain connection. Your messages will show as gray until they've been confirmed as received by your server.

Message Correction

Made a typo in a message? Using Message Correction XEP-0308 you can just double tap the up arrow to edit and send a corrected version. In other clients that support correction, your last message will be updated in place and marked as edited.

Timezone Indications

Working with someone in a different timezone? If the other person is using Kaiwa or another client that supports Entity Time (XEP-0202) you'll see a reminder that they're 9 hours away where it's 4am and they're not likely to respond.