Ordinary software companies can also develop a set of their own “wechat”? Yes you read that right, and it’s easy and economical, as you’ll see after reading this article. Here’s how to do it:
Develop from scratch
Professionals know this is a fable, it is impossible for the average company, even if the economic strength of the company, has a strong team, also needs to be developed by a lot of time, need a lot of time to verify, need a lot of users to burnish, not two or three years is not able to mature.
Notice that no matter how much money you have, no matter how many people you put in, it’s going to take at least this much time. Just like a pregnant woman from pregnancy to childbirth takes 10 months, looking for 10 pregnant women can not produce a baby in a month. The reason for listing this option is to tell you that this is not the way to go, because many people still don’t understand this reality, many bosses and project managers want to find a team of three people and develop commercial IM in three months! It is possible to make a toy. It is impossible to reach commercial level. Just look at how many people work on wechat and how many years it has been developed.
With the help of cloud communication service providers
Starting from zero is not possible, then try to stand on the shoulders of “giants”, only stand higher, in order to see further. There are several “instant messaging cloud” providers that can help you implement this directory. First explain the instant messaging cloud, is by the instant messaging professional company, responsible for IM communication technology, for customers, neither need to develop IM services, nor need to operate and maintain IM servers, just use the instant messaging cloud manufacturers to provide SDK and API, can access. There are several common existing strength such as ring X, rong X and cloud X. Tencent and Alibaba also offer similar services. An example is that the bullet message, once popular in the country, is the service of Cloud X, and only in this way can Lao Luo make commercial products supporting tens of millions of users in a short time.
The benefits are obvious, but what are the downsides? The answer is yes. I think there are several aspects:
- Information and users are the core assets of an enterprise, and it is always not reassuring to put them in the hands of others.
- Demand is fast changing and diverse, especially in the Internet industry, slow step is a world of difference, cloud service providers have the ability, how much motivation to help you achieve?
- Cloud communication service competition has come to the second half, to the harvest season, from the initial free to the present charge standard has been repeatedly raised, and then increased, I believe that many customers have experienced.
- Giant cloud communications are edge products, the fate of edge products is difficult to guarantee. The death rate for startups is well known, and when it goes down, it goes down every day.
As far as I know, some powerful companies did use them in the early stage, but they all have their own Plan B. Once the time is ripe, it is more reassuring to deploy to their own computer room. Ordinary companies are just lambs to be slaughtered!
Using open Source IM
Then there is the use of open source IM. This puts forward certain challenge to user’s development ability. Strange to say, open source IM has a standard solution since the ancient times (PC era), XMPP, into the mobile Internet era has not a standard, even Google/Microsoft /FB/ Tencent giants have not even tried to set a standard. Let me guess that Google/Microsoft are both dominant in the PC era and don’t pay enough attention to IM on mobile Internet (Gtalk/Skype are both desktop products, mobile terminal is not good, and they didn’t try to open source after failure), as for facebook/ Tencent and other mobile Internet giants, because they have their own core products, they are not likely to make a standard for everyone to use. There are also many examples of mature commercial products developed by tier 1 companies but not willing to share them because of the high cost. In addition, some people say that because of the Internet era, the pace is too fast, and everyone is competing with each other, there is no time to sit down and discuss a standard, and there is no hope of co-existence with friends, so there is no motivation to formulate standards.
As a result, the core technology of IM is monopolized in the hands of a few companies, making it difficult for ordinary companies to really own the core technology. There are a lot of companies selling IM services and even source code on the market, and there are a lot of open source IM on Github, which is hard for ordinary companies to own. There are plenty of options, to be sure, but they are mixed. Because IM is a very low threshold, people often want to write something to practice, then write an IM, some even do not have a client, with beautiful README and excellent writing, you can get a lot of stars. However, it is very difficult to do IM well. If you have not been in this industry for 5 or even 10 years and have not made products with more than 100 million users, how can you say that you do IM well?
XMPP is the only standard for IM. It was born in the PC era, uses XML, is bloated, inefficient, and confusing. Internet giants have not used it to evolve on mobile devices, but have started from the ground up using proprietary protocols. Nature deficiency, nurture disorder. However, limited by the lack of alternatives, they are still pushing forward to the mobile end, but there are many problems that make many people shy away.
Others are open source, many of them spoof, feature-deficient, untested and of questionable sustainability. There are also some secondary development based on XMPP, congenital deficiency. There is also the use of proprietary agreements, the goal is to commercialize, but limited by the team capacity and user base, product quality and functionality. Of course, there are some really good open source IM out there, and Wildfire IM is one of them.
Wildfires IM
The wildfire IM team set a goal from the very beginning to address these pain points and provide companies and developers with low-cost, high-quality IM capabilities. Wildfire IM has the following features:
-
The core members of wildfire IM team have more than 5 years or even more than 10 years of IM industry experience, and have done products and services for more than 100 million people. For IM, supporting 100 users and 1W users is a different difficulty level, supporting 1W and 100 million users is a higher difficulty level, without the support of corresponding users, it is difficult or experience in this aspect.
-
Wildfire IM is purely private deployment. The services deployed by customers themselves do not have any dependence on us and can run in a pure Intranet environment. The customer is freed from dependence on a third party.
-
The protocol of Wildfire IM is more advanced. Based on MQTT protocol, wildfire IM is developed twice. Protobuf is used for serialization. The redundancy of data packets is very small and the reconnection mechanism is simple and reliable, which is very suitable for the complex network environment of mobile networks.
-
The Wildfire IM client uses Mars, the core connection library of wechat, which has been used by more than a billion people for a decade and its stability can stand the test. In addition, Mars has made a series of optimizations for mobile networks. Mars also supports long and short connections, which not only takes into account IM concurrent requirements, but also saves network resources. In addition, Mars also has a client circuit breaker strategy. In addition, WCDB (the database of wechat) is also referred to, and SQLite is built into the Wildfire IM protocol stack to ensure the same data processing logic for multiple platforms and the consistency of performance of each platform.
-
The Wildfire IM server is based on Moquette, which is an excellent open source MQTT server with high code quality and lays a solid foundation for the Wildfire IM server.
-
Wildfire IM has high security. All details of wildfire IM are carefully considered. AES encryption is used for the whole link, and sqlcipher is used for the encryption of the client database.
-
Wildfire IM has good performance. The IM server uses NetTY and the protocol is simple and efficient. After testing, the single-core CPU can send more than 1000 messages /S. Professional version of the service support level of expansion, performance is also higher, can support more than ten million users.
-
Wildfire IM has perfect functions. IM functions are close to all parts of WECHAT IM, including single chat/group chat/channel (similar to wechat public account), single audio and video support (many people are still under development), text message/picture message/small video message/voice message/location message/file message. Support your circle of friends. Support offline push, support group management, support friend relationship, support user information hosting. It also supports chat rooms.
-
Wildfire IM has a low threshold of usage, and the community edition server only relies on mysql and can run with only one JAR package. The pro version has no more than five components. Server maintenance is also very simple. The client is written in native language, easy to read, packaging secondary development is very easy. The client is layered, and it’s easy to add the SDK parts to the client’s existing APP.
-
Strong ability to expand. Wildfire IM full consideration to the diversity of customer needs, design the client layer, when the design custom message, the server API, etc., so that customers can use the wildfire IM as a complete kit, use of the service API and the client SDK, you can change the without any wildfire IM under the condition of the core code, to achieve your business requirements. The client SDK and the server API (which provides a Java version of the SDK) are as good as any cloud communication service provider in terms of experience. Customers who have used cloud communication services will be very familiar with them.
-
Wildfire IM has full platform capability, supporting Android /iOS/Web/ wechat applet /Windows/Mac. A Linux version is also under development.
-
Wildfire IM has some paid items, yes you read that right, good things have a price, only the development team has a steady and continuous income can continue to maintain. Especially a full set of IM services, commercial level requires a larger team, need to invest more energy to continue to develop, if all free, may be afraid to use the normal company, because one day might be abandoned at any time, when the time comes into all of the resources is a problem. Of course, our very affordable, community version services and mobile terminal are all free, application services, push services and robot services are free, under normal circumstances more than 95% of users do not have to pay. Other part of the project charges are also very close to the people, the specific price please see the document
Experience Wildfire IM
Talk is cheap, please download wechat scan code experience.
In addition, according to the rapid experience deployment on their own server (PC can also, not necessarily on the server), and then pack mobile terminal, slowly taste your own wechat!
Below is a GIF we recorded.
The last
The author is interested in wildfire IM, please think independently and dialectically.