# Overview

Smack is a library for client-to-server XMPP connections to perform real-time communications and data exchange. This includes, but is not limited to, instant messaging and group chat. More genericly speaking, it allows you to easily exchange data in various ways: For example fire-and-forget, publish-subscribe, between human and non-human endpoints. The use cases include M2M, IoT, and many more.

Smack is a pure Java library, open-source and highly modular. It runs on Android and Java SE. The API strives to be easy to use but yet powerful.

## Key Advantages

Smack is extremely simple to use. Sending a text message to a user can be accomplished in only a few lines of code.

    AbstractXMPPConnection connection = new XMPPTCPConnection("mtucker", "password", "jabber.org");
    connection.connect().login();

    Message message = new Message("jsmith@igniterealtime.org", "Howdy! How are you?");
    connection.sendStanza(message);

Smack doesn't force you to code at the protcol level of XMPP. The library provides intelligent higher level constructs, often called {@link org.jivesoftware.smack.Manager}, which let you program more efficiently. Other examples of those constructs are the Chat and Roster classes.

Smack comes with APIs for easy machine-to-machine communication. You can set any number of properties on each message, including properties that are Java objects.

Smack is open-source under the Apache License 2.0, which means you can incorporate Smack into your commercial or non-commercial applications.

## About XMPP

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an open protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and supported and extended by the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF).