[JDEV] New Transport Architecture - Idea

[Mark Zamoyta]

Jabber Transports are great things, but I'm sure you'll agree they're
extremely difficult to build, debug, and release in a stable version.  Even
then, the transport must be installed on each Jabber server desiring to use
it.

I'm thinking :  Jabber needs to leverage the work of the hundreds of
thousands of web programmers and script writers.   Perhaps a Web Server
Transport could be written that will take advantage of the millions of
existing web sites and PHP / ASP / JSP / CGI programmers.

For example, lets say a sports fan wants to receive batter by batter updates
during a baseball game.  His Jabber server would need a "Sports Update"
transport.  But as we know, very few people have the technical ability to
write such a transport.

With some kind of Web Server Transport, Jabber would simply act as a gateway
to a web server.  For example:
1)  The Jabber user would subscribe to espn.web.jabber.org.
2)  The Web Server Transport would send an HTML request to jabber.espn.com
3)  The Web Server Transport  would package the resulting HTML (or XML)
into a Jabber XML message and pass it back to the user.
4)  The Web Server Transport would poll jabber.espn.com, or it would receive
pushes from the web server, passing appropriate HTML along to subscribers.

The main benefit of such a transport is that it would treat web sites as
transports, leveraging the content of many web sites and programming ability
of their authors.

Another example would be:  Instead of writing a "Horoscope Transport", let
the hundreds of Horoscope web sites out there create some simple web pages
that can be called by the Jabber Web Server Transport.  Jabber users would
subscribe to janes_horoscopes.web.jabber.org , which would spring into
action when the user came on-line.  Or if janes_horoscopes gave too much
HTML for their Jabber client to handle, they could subscribe to
bobs_horoscopes, or any other Jabber-client-friendly web site.

I think such a transport architecture would help Jabber grow real fast and
offer lots of great features!!  Jabber's programming pool will increase by
millions.

I'm interested in your feedback, or any work done on such a transport.
Thanks,
Mark