[JDEV] Peer to peer Jabber streams

[Michael Wilson]

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

Personally I think peer-to-peer is a much /more/ elegant solution;
certainly it makes much better use of the mesh topology of the
internet. Symmetric peer-to-peer (where there's no fundemental
distinction between servers and clients; servers simply have more
bandwidth and some transports mounted) is even better. The problem
is that such systems are fiendishly complicated to implement;
most projects simply don't have the time to do so.

> 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.

Using Jabber as you control system would allow you to get around the
dynamic IP problem, but you're still constrained by firewalls that
don't allow incoming TCP connections (admittadly firewalls that
block this often also block UDP). Alas this makes peer-to-peer
rather impractical for corporate environments; sometimes we haven't
even been able to use normal Jabber connections (and had to HTTP
encapsulate).

If this is off-topic for j_dev, let me know and I'll refrain from
bringing my soapbox in future. ;>

-- 
| Michael Wilson               "Smart Applications - Tools for life"
| Java Developer                           available @              
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