Jabber as chat system for a asp.net website

Question

I'm building a website at this moment, and before starting this small project, my greatest fear was to implement some sort of a chatting system in the website.

So the functionality of this chat should be very simple, for example if 2 users are online they can chat with each other, if a user is not online, but someone sents him a message, next time he logs in, he should be able to read and reply to the message. So it should be something like facebook chat, etc ...

My friend adviced me to check out the Jabber. I was searching but didnt find any good information about that. Maybe anyone has any good links for information? Or any examples or any advise?

Thanks in advance

AN UPDATE:

Thank you for all the replies, but i still dont really understand will i be able to integrate it in the web based messaging system, and im not talking about the chat rooms or chats, it is more like email, where you users can talk to each other, but if they are not online the message is saved untill the user is back online.

What i've read is that it is more like chat rooms and chat applications, but not really web based stuff, or am i wrong?

Because for example will i need to automatically create a jabber account for each user who is registered on my website? Is it possible programmatically?

Answer 1

I'd recomend using Strophe framework . It helps you to easy start your investigation in few lines:

var con = new Strophe.Connection(“jabber-server.com”);
con.connect(“my@account.com”, “mypassword”, onJabberConnected);

function onJabberConnected(status)
{
    switch(status)
    {
        Strophe.Status.CONNECTED:
            ...
    }
}

Answer 2

I'd start here: http://code.google.com/p/jabber-net/

Personally, I am still a fan of IRC as a protocol. There are plenty of IRC servers out there to use and hooking in is trivial.

Answer 3

When you are new to XMPP (Jabber) then you should start at:
http://xmpp.org

If you want to learn more then you should read at least one of the books listed here:
http://xmpp.org/resources/books/

You should read especially those:
XMPP: The Definitive Guide
Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery

The first one gives you an great overview about the technology. IMHO teh best solution for a web based chat is HTML and Java Script with a library like Strophe. And this is what the second book is about. It comes with lots of examples and a very feature complete web chat client example.