[JDEV] Just an idea...

[Rob Brown]

Please forgive me if this is a rehashing of things that have already been 
discussed.

I am curious if anyone has considered having an "extended" protocol for 
clients, where clients can reduce load on the server and provide extended 
functionality, by becoming "listening" servers themselves.  The idea being 
that clients do not have to support this, but ones that do will identify 
themselves as such and the server (which also doesn't have to support it) 
can use it if it wants to.

The two things this might be useful for are:

1.  allows the client and/or server to close the connection while still 
maintaining "presense", probably allowing the server to scale better 
because it doesn't need a persistent connection for every person.  If an 
event happens, the server knows how to contact the client because it 
maintains its address.  This would be transparent to the users: from their 
point of view, they never have to know when a connection is open or not, 
they simply have enabled a setting which allows the server (or the client) 
to decide when it is appropriate to close the connection.  Presumably it 
would close the connection if it's inactive for a period of time.

2.  allow trusted members of your buddy-list to connect directly to your 
machine.  The user could allow some or all of the people on his list to 
directly communicate peer-to-peer if they also support the extended 
protocol.  If they don't support it, or they don't wish to connect peer to 
peer with you, it falls back on the current behavior.

I would imagine that if you can connect peer to peer with another client, 
there are things you could do that would otherwise put too much load on the 
server...sending files/voice chat/etc.  I always liked ICQ's "continuous" 
chat mode (where characters show up as you type them), but even that might 
put a lot of strain on the server since it is so inefficient.  If you are 
connected peer-to-peer, who cares?

This seems to address most if not all of the reasons I have seen given for 
the Jabber approach of "everything goes through the server".  Messages to 
people on other systems (ICQ etc) would still go through the server of 
course, and the client can still be ultra-simple if it doesn't want to 
bother supporting this protocol.

Has anything like this been discussed?  Already been soundly rejected? :)

-rob