[JDEV] Newbie with question

[Thomas Charron]

From: "ritchie turner" <javaguy512 at yahoo.com>
Subject: [JDEV] Newbie with question
> I am interested in the extensibility of jabber on the
> server. I read somewhere in Jeremie's intro to 1.2
> that the server was extensible. I'm particularly
> interested in python extensions. Can someone tell me
> where to look? I'm not really a C hacker so telling me
> to look at the source won't work ;)

  The wonderful thing about the server components is, you can write modules
to actually be simple apps using STDIN/STDOUT.  Basically, transports
(services) can be loaded by dynamic libraries, a listening socket, a
connected socket, or a launched app, using STDIN/STDOUT.  The hard part here
would be the fact that there is no up to date python 'libraries' for
actually parsing and dealing with the protocol.  There *IS* an older set of
archives in cvs on jabber.org with the repository name of 'python-code',
which actually includes a small smtp transport written entirely in python.
It doesn't look to have been updated since July, so I suspect it may suffer
from a bit of code rot, but it could probrably be updated to the newest
protocol specs for transports.

> I'm writing multi user games, and it seems to me, and
> I may be totally wrong, that I could use the jabber
> server components as the backbone to all my game
> messaging, not just IM??? If I can use my own
> namespaces in the stream and pass them off to my own
> python extensions, then I see a lot of infrastructure
> labor vanishing. Is this possible, thanks for any
> insight.

    Yes, very possible.  Either via Info/Query extentions, or using the x
tags with a custom namespace just for you.

    If you don't know how to use CVS, you can download snapshots from
http://download.jabber.org/cvs/.  The python archive also includes a client,
named PyJabber, which could give you a very good idea on how your games
could connect from the client side, if they are also written in Python.