Candy chat on phonegap app

Question

I'm currently working on a project for a student led program at my school to make a mobile application that involves advertising various events and such, but more importantly, allows the app users to chat to one another. My question has to do with this chat functionality. I have heard good things about candy chat, and thought I might try to use it. The issue I have run into is setting up the XMPP server.

The program I'm doing this for has a very limited budget, so I have to find the cheapest solution possible to host this XMPP server. The idea I had, was to somehow use Google's App Engine or a similar cloud computing platform with a good free offering as the backend chat server. So, my question is, does anyone have any experience in doing something similar to this who can give me a better idea of how to accomplish it? Not necessarily with the exact same tools, but at least a similar concept.

Also, if I'm going in the totally wrong direction, feel free to set me straight. I'm still in the very early stages of this project, so I'm not really tied to any aspects of this solution, this just seemed to be the most straightforward way to go to me.

Thanks guys!

Answer 1

Since you seem to have a budget constraint, I would suggest going with the free tier of Amazon's EC2 service (Google App Engine won't work as it only lets you implement an xmpp client, not a server). You can host any XMPP Server on your Amazon EC2 instance. Ejabberd seems to be a popular choice.

I think you're in the right general direction, once you have your XMPP Server installed and running, you can easily connect whatever client you want to it.