MQTT vs. XMPP Which Should I Choose?
Overview
I am sending messages back and forth between a client (Android phone) and a Server (Windows Server). Using a persistent connection over TCP, which protocol would be the best solution. I am looking at performance, scalability, size of messages, and battery life. The messages must arrive at the destination in order and can not be duplicates.
This seems like the better solution, but there seems to be little examples of large implementation with lots of users. I am not sure if I can integrate this into the windows server, or if it would have to be another application or server running. Finally there seems to be a lack of information on it in general.
This seems to have lots of implementation, examples, and even a book : ). However the main purpose seems to be for instant messaging clients and things like Google talk. Will this be an optimal solution to messaging between server and client. I know currently XMPP is mostly used in client to server to client architectures.
Please correct me if I am wrong and thanks in advance for any guidance.
Answer
It depends on what you are trying to do and what hardware you are running.
MQTT has very low keep-alive traffic. XMPP is a an IM protocol, and has a much, much higher overhead in handling presence messages between all the clients.
If you have a small memory footprint constraint, then having to handle the XML parser may make the use of XMPP impossible.
Keep in mind that MQTT stands for Message Queue Telemetry Transport, i.e., it is a transport protocol and does not define the message format at all - you will have to supply this; XMPP is an Instant Messaging protocol which carefully defines all the message formats and requires that all messages be in XML.
In addition to all this: MQTT is a publish subscribe protocol, XMPP is an instant messaging protocol that can be extended (using XEP-0060) to support publish subscribe. You need to consider this when you architect your system.
We are finding MQTT to be the quiet achiever. Your milage might be different.
It all depends ...
Track down the recent announcement by LinkedIn where they discuss their use of MQTT in their mobile app.
Cheers Mark
(BTW Andy was slightly off in his reference to us. We are at Centre for Educational Innovation & Technology (CEIT), The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia)