[JDEV] Peer to peer Jabber streams

[Sunir Shah]

Michael Wilson wrote:

> I'm personally interested in peer-to-peer messaging, but I
> was under impression that the client-server model was one of
> the fundemental premises of Jabber. The reasons for using peer
> to peer (low lag, simplicity) are usually also reasons not to
> use a heavyweight protocol like Jabber.

Actually, messaging is the least of my concerns. I'd highly
encourage people to send messages through the Jabber server.
Moreover, I'd highly discourage people from authenticating
peer connects that aren't negotiated through the Jabber server.
(No spam, please.)

The peer-to-peer connections are important not in applications
where message caching is good, like instant messaging, but in
applications that are relatively real time and "push." For
instance, groupware.

Since groupware applications can easily generate more messages
than the Jabber server can stomach (most of them programmatically
generated), they simply cannot run on the server. From a more
practical point of view, the server won't even allow them to run
due to the rate limitation system (i.e. karma).

I agree very much that peer-to-peer is not elegant. Optimizations
rarely are, and this is most certainly a bandwidth optimization.

By the way, there are two ways to do peer connections. The common
one is UDP. The one I'm interested in is TCP/IP. Well, "normal" 
sockets (vs. connectionless). This essentially makes the client 
a "server" as someone else pointed out, albeit a very limited one. 

SS

P.S. Thanks for the link on Starlight.