On a recent project I needed the ability to register and unregister users from a Rails app, specifically a simple User model. At first I just added the necessary capabilities to the model itself…then realized the functionality really should exist as a library/helper. Well, if I’m going that far - might as well just drop it into a “plugin”.

You can find the plugin here: xmmp4rails.

xmmp4rails is a simple method-level layer around a “few” of the capabilities provided by the awesome xmpp4r library.

To get the plugin:

<code>
git clone git://github.com/kitplummer/xmpp4rails.git
</code>

Here’s how I’ve used it - in my model I’ve got this:

<code>
...
before_create :xmpp_register?
...
def xmpp_register?
    begin
      register_account(self.login + "@" + CONFIG['hostname'], self.password)
    rescue StandardError
      return false
    else
      simple_send('gateway@' + CONFIG['hostname'], 
                         'CONFIG['jabberpw'], 
                         'admin@' + CONFIG['hostname'], 
                         "new account: #{identity_url}")
      return true
    end
end
</code>

So, if the registration fails, so the does the account creation. Obviously with the library called from the model you can do different things with it. Notice the simple_send method too. When an account gets created in the app - the model sends me a notification via Jabber.

I’ve also provide a simple stub so the models can still test out completely.

Hopefully this will be useful for someone else. I’d also love a reason to keep extending the functionality wrapped, as well as flesh out the tests with RSpec. Let me know.