I am planning to integrate real time notifications into a web application that I am currently working on. I have decided to go with XMPP for this and selected openfire server which i thought to be suitable for my needs.

The front end uses strophe library to fetch the notifications using BOSH from my openfire server. However the notices are the notifications and other messages are to be posted by my application and hence I think this code needs to reside at the backend. Initially I thougt of going with PHP XMPP libraries like XMPHP and JAXL but then I think that this would cause much overhead as each script will have to do same steps like connection, authentication etc. and I think this would make the PHP end a little slow and unresponsive.

Now I am thinking of creating a middle-ware application acting as a web service that the PHP will call and this application will handle the stuff with XMPP service. The benefit with this is that this app(a server if you will) will have to connect just once and the it will sit there listening on a port. also I am planning to build it in a asynchronous way such that It will first take all the requests from my PHp app and then when there are no more requests; go about doing the notification publishing stuff. I am planninng to create this service in Python using SleekXMPP.

This is just what I planned. I am new to XMPP and this whole web service stuff ans would like to take your comments on this regarding issues like memory and CPU usage, advantages, disadvantages, scalability issues,security etc.

Thanks in advance.

PS:-- also if something like this already exists(although I didn't find after a lot of Googling) Please direct me there.

EDIT --- The middle-level service should be doing the following(but not limited to): 1. Publishing notifications for different level of groups and community pages. 2. Notification for single user on some event. 3. User registration(can be done using user service plugin though).

EDIT --- Also it should like to create pub-sub nodes and subscribe and unsubscribe users from these pub-sub nodes.

Also I want to store the notifications and messages in a database(openfire doesn't). Would that be a good choice?