[JDEV] Peer to peer Jabber streams (was: Cool ICQ style messa ges)

[Sunir Shah]

> Well, most of ICQ is peer-to-peer, whereas with Jabber everything goes 
> through the server.

I think a lot of people, including myself, are thinking about
a peer to peer Jabber protocol. Who else is interested? I'm
aware others are working on this, though I haven't spoken with
them yet.

My loose plan was to use messages through Jabber server to
synchronize, negotiate, etc. the peer network, and then open
up a *Jabber* stream to the peer. Since a Jabber XML stream is 
an event stream, it's easy to merge both the server event queue
and the peer event queues together into one event queue which
the application then services blind to the origin socket. In 
that way, only the connection layer needs to change (aside 
from the negotiation protocol).

Doing this with one peer to another peer is easy. Doing this
for something like groupchat would be less easy. But that's 
absolutely critical as well.

For small networks, a complete network topology would be the
easiest and more efficient. But for a large network, that would
quickly overwhelm each peer with socket connection management
and traffic.

I'd have to read up on the distributed computing journals to
know what a robust, efficient, dynamic network protocol would
be. Maybe someone else knows?

Also, with the Jabber server, we have an advantage. This space
is above the peer network, and more robust. Consequently, it's
much stronger than most of the distributed computing models I
know.

SS