using XMPP or WebSocket, why there is a server nee

问题:

At the bottom, it's all about socket communications. If there is some way to get the ip of the both users, why can't the connection be directly setup between the users instead of having to go thru a server in the middle?

回答1:

My 2 cents:

No one out there forces us to have a server based real-time communication model. Infact XMPP have an extension called "Serverless Messaging" which defines how to communicate over local or wide-area networks using the principles of zero-configuration networking for endpoint discovery and the syntax of XML streams and XMPP messaging for real-time communication. This method uses DNS-based Service Discovery and Multicast DNS to discover entities that support the protocol, including their IP addresses and preferred ports.

P2P chat applications have been for over a decade now. Having a server in the middle is purely a decision dependent upon your application needs. If your application can live with chats getting lost while the user was transitioning between online/offline status, then you can very well have a direct P2P model going. Similarly, there are a loads and loads of advantages (contact list management, avatars, entity discovery, presence authorization, offline messages, ....) when it comes to choosing a server based messaging model. If you try to have all this right inside your P2P based clients, they might die or under-perform because of all the work they will need to perform by themselves.

"WebSockets" were not designed for P2P/Serverless communication, rather they were designed to provide a standardized PUSH semantic over stateless HTTP protocol. In short, "WebSockets" is a standardized way replacing hacky comet, long-polling, chunked-encoding, jsonp, iframe-based and various other technique developers have been using to simulate server push over HTTP.

回答2:

Named WebSockets (if someday it is fully and widely supported) could be the solution.

http://namedwebsockets.github.io/spec/

Named WebSockets are useful in a variety of collaborative local device and local network scenarios: Discover matching peer services on the local device and/or the local network.

回答3:

Direct communication between users is possible in Peer To Peer (P2P) networks. In P2P each participant can act as client as well as server. But for P2P networks you need to write a separate program to make the communication possible.

Web Sockets let you leverage existing common browsers as clients. All depends on what is the purpose of your application and how you want to deploy it.

回答4:

If there is some way to get the ip of the both users

You nailed the answer right in your question.

Most machines I use have IP address of 192.168.0.10 (or similar from 192.168. private network) and are deep, deep behind several layers of NAT. With the end of free IPv4 address pool and IPv6 nowhere near sight, this is the reality most users live. Having a stable intermediary of known, routable address helps a ton working around this issue.

回答5:

WebSockets don't allow the socket to listen for connections, only to connect as a client to a server (not reverse). Technically they could make it allow this, but as far as I understand the spec doesn't currently (nor is it expected to) allow listen functionality for WebSockets.

The new WebRTC (http://www.webrtc.org/) spec looks like it might support peer-to-peer connections. I have not played with WebRTC at all so I'm not in a position to comment on it. I think it would be a bit more involved than WebSocket stuff. Maybe someone who knows WebRTC better can chime in. (Also apart from the latest version of Chrome I'm not sure if any of the other browsers really support WebRTC yet).