[JDEV] Napster and Jabber

[Evan Martin]

A friend of mine forwarded me Eliot Landrum's post "Jabster Proposal" about
Napster to this list.

I'm the author of gnome-napster, so I thought I should reply to a few points
in his email.

- The Napster Protocol:
Yes, it is ugly.  Yes, the messaging protocol seems redundant, which is why
it is at the bottom of my TODO list.
Discussion of the Napster protocol is current on the "napdev" mailing list,
at http://www.onelist.com/community/napdev .  This is where the protocol is
discussed.

- Napster Server:
"drscholl" (drscholl at hotmail.com) is currently developing a open source
Napster server, and documenting the protocol as he does it.  I try to keep
the latest version of his protocol specification on my home page
(http://students.washington.edu/eeyem/), which is also where anybody
interested can download my Napster client.  To just look at the protocol
spec, visit http://students.washington.edu/eeyem/gn/napster.txt .
Napster uses multiple unlinked servers.  This means that the content on each
server is independent of the others.  Napster servers are probably under
incredible loads, because searching is expensive.
The Napster protocol currently has a few design flaws that prevent linking
the servers.  This could be worked around, but it would break compatibility
with the existing protocol.  The Windows client doesn't let you specify a
server anyway, so that may be a nonissue.

- Server Design:
Eliot wrote, "- Server gathers list of results, checks to see which of the
hosts that have
the requested songs are online, pings them and sends list back to client."
This would add the additional load of pinging to the server, which isn't a
good idea and doesn't accurately represent the client-client ping anyway.
I appreciate that the idea is new, I just thought I should add that you
should offload as much processing as possible to the client.

Finally, is there a mailing list archive where I could read the responses to
his post?

Evan.

(To the napdev list members: jabber is a messaging client, visit
http://www.jabber.org for more information.)