[JDEV] Cool ICQ style messages - see the typing

[Robert Temple]

This is pretty useful stuff for client developers.   People here 
have been asking for the MSN Messenger feature of showing when a 
buddy is typing a message.  This will allow me to do this using 
a standard jabber:x:* message.

I do have a few questions/comments:

Are the offline events going to be supported in server 1.4?  Is it 
reasonable to assume that the rest of the events will be passed 
from client to client in earlier versions of the servers?  

Can you shed some light on why it is important to send a empty 
response after some timeout?  I can see sending the empty response
after a recipient reads the message and then closes the message 
window without sending a reply but not after a timeout.

If users are currently sending 'chat' type messages back and forth, 
I'd like to send reply events (say every 15 seconds or so) while
users are typing, like MSN does.  Does that sound reasonable, or
is this new feature not intended for such purposes?

Has anyone thought about how this will affect the scalability of the
servers?  Sending out event packets could effectively double or
triple the amount of message traffic being sent out.  I know that
MSN can get away with this because they use different servers for 
messaging.   I also know that Yahoo would like to do something 
similar, but they cannot right now because they use the same 
server for presence and messaging and don't feel their servers
will scale well enough to handle this.  Are the server people 
confident that the new servers can handle all the extra traffic?

Last, you say this is a draft protocol.  Does that mean that this
new feature is something that we can give comments on and 
potentially have it modified or refined slightly based on 
feedback?  Is there an official process for submitting feedback/
comments that will get to the people coming up with the protocol?
I have tried to send comments Mr. Miller before, but those have 
all been ignored :(

Thanks,
Robert Temple

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Millard [mailto:me at pgmillard.com]
> Subject: Re: [JDEV] Cool ICQ style messages - see the typing
>
> This functionality was originally "hacked" into the JabberIM 
> program so I changed Winjab to support it.. But we now have a draft 
> protocol that defines these "message-events"..  Checkout
> 
> http://docs.jabber.org/draft-proto/html/events.html
> 
> It's the "correct" way of doing msg events.. and supports the "foo is
> replying" type deal.