[JDEV] Misc Status..

[David Waite]

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Robert Thompson wrote:

> May I ask why it's all done through the server?
> 
> I mean, for users accessing chat from a browser, I can understand using the
> server.
> 
> But for users doing 1-to-1 or group chat, it doesn't make sense to do
> everything through the server when for 1-to-1, peer to peer is fine, and for
> groups, there is a good chance that one of them has a connection fast enough
> to server all the others.

Actually it isn't fine. People behind firewalls and proxies, for instance,
have no way of being able to chat with other people.

> Yahoo, AOL, ICQ...they all do it like this (well the only one I have inside
> knowledge of is Yahoo).  The reason is that the community can have many many
> more users....if you do everything through a server it's going to eventually
> get complicated to manage large communities of users.

Hmm, I thought AOL was totally client-server based. ICQ allows peer-peer,
but it honestly only works for me about 40% of the time.. and the
different allowable rules between peer-peer and server sending (such as an
imposed message size limit on sending through the server) is very
annoying. End users should not have to deal with that sort of thing.

Also, for interoperability with other systems, it is nice to have the
backend of the jabber server handle all the other protocols, rather than
having to hack some manner of support for AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, PowWow (am
I forgetting any big ones? I know I am forgetting at least ten small
ones like EGM) into each and every client.

-David Waite