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JWChat and Google Talk setup

Recently, I needed to access gtalk from behind a firewall that blocked access to sites like gmail, google talk, facebook etc.

So, I decided to prepare a workaround – jabber web client with its own http bind. Roughly said, it’s tunneling via http (port 80) to allowed host. The stupid firewall sees only http connection to unknown server (my own server somewhere else). The request is forwarded to whatever jabber you want – google talk in my case.

The web client is JWCHat (see the demo here), the http binding is done using JabberHTTPBind. I am not going to explain the installation steps here, you can find plenty of blog posts about that.

 

To connect to google talk you have to do it like this:

1. Fill in basic setup:

Backend: Open Relay
Server: gmail.com (or your domain if you have your own domain)

2. Click “Show more options” and fill the following:

Connect Port: 5222
Connect Host: talk.google.com

 

The reason is quite simple – the jabber domain is gmail.com. The jabber id is constructed as

username@server/resource

Usually, the jabber server and real server to connect to is the same (e.g. jabber.org), in case of google talk it’s not the same (which makes sense since you can have as many domains as you want).