[JDEV] Server-based History

[Michael Brown]

I am just wanting to get the thoughts from people on if it makes sense to
store Jabber message history on the server.  I believe that this has been
looked at in the past, but I am unsure if it is still being considered or
worked on.

The main reason to store history on the server is that when you change
clients you don't loose access to all the history that has been sent to your
other resources.  The other advantage is that is would simplify all the
clients very much and decrease their memory footprint since they would not
need some sort of database engine to store/search message history.

The disadvantages of course are...

You have all your personal conversations sitting on the server and you have
to trust the admin of that server to keep your data safe and confidential.
I would hope there would be some type of encryption that could help out
here.  I suspect that there is no absolute method of  preventing the person
who is running your server from being able to access your message history if
they really wanted to, but considering that all the messages are going
through that server anyway (at present in plain-text) I can't really see it
being much of an issue.

This is going to put a larger load on the servers and take much more disk
resources.  To give you some idea, I have been using ICQ for years now, and
never delete history.  My history file is 8.5MB with a 13MB index.  Does
anyone know how much space companies like Hotmail give you for email
accounts?  The obvious solution here is to let the admins set a file limit
and have messages over a certain date expire once that limit is reached.
This could perhaps be used to an ISP's advantage - they give you a free
Jabber account with 5MB of space, but for $50/year they will increase it to
20MB.

Speed.  Every time you browse the message history, it has to be fetched from
the server.  Of course this will be less of an issue as bandwidth increases,
and it could be offset a bit by all the searches etc being done on the
(faster?) server.

You don't have access to your history if you are not connected to the
server.  (But then you don't have access to your roster either)


Comments?

Michael.