[JDEV] Buddy icon support?

[Jens Alfke]

Is anyone considering how to implement support for buddy icons in 
Jabber? By this I mean the ability to retrieve from the server a small 
picture of another user, to display in the buddy list or chat windows. 
AIM has this feature. Ideally you would be notified in semi-real time of 
changes to a user's icon, so they could alter it along with their status.

Simply storing the buddy icon isn't difficult -- I'd probably use the 
server-side data storage feature making up a new namespace for the 
purpose, and putting the image data as Base64'd CDATA inside an element. 
The problem is how to notify people when the picture changes. Otherwise 
other clients will either retrieve it only once (and miss changes) or 
keep polling it (which wastes bandwidth.) Here the best answer I have is 
to add an optional flag to the <presence> element that notifies 
listeners that they should re-fetch the picture.

(I'm aware that the protocol list would be the ideal place to discuss 
this, but that list appears to be essentially defunct, so I'm using jdev 
instead. If anyone's interested in starting a discussion of this, I'll 
gladly move that to the proto list.)

--Jens