[JDEV] my interest -- a few questions

[qbradley at csc.UVic.CA]

On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, c. chris erway wrote:

[...snip...]

> b] can modules / transports be written in perl?  i'd love to help out, and perl
> seems like a great language for writing socket transports, etc.  there are a
> ton of perl modules that do everything -- pgp, xml parsing, etc.

They can be written in anything as long as they can read and write XML
over a socket.
 
> d] uin's / id's / searching -- this might seem too simplistic, but, basically,
> how's the "search for a user" work?  the jabber distribution model seems to
> imply that no one server can know where every other jabber server is -- thus
> would there have to be a central jabber "directory server" that every jabber
> server would have to have a special module to connect to?

It would not be trivial to make a "search for user" option but there are a
few ways you could go about it.  One approach would be to have a voluntary
directory where people could enter their jabber adresses and names.  This
is an approach I would favor.  Another possibility would be to extend the
servers to perhaps respond to a query from a user with a list of users.
This has lots of problems, first being that you would need a standard way
of addressing servers and the second being that many users would not want
to be listed in such ways.  Furthermore, you would still need a list of
servers which probably would not be all that accurate.  I think one or
many voluntary databases where people can enter their names and make
queries is the best approach.

Quetzalcoatl Bradley
qbradley at csc.uvic.ca