[JDEV] Peer to peer Jabber streams (LONG) (was: Cool ICQ style messages)

[dlb]

(LONG)

I'm interested in this area as well , but tend to see the Jabber XML
protocol and the general design concept of Jabber to be better suited as a
bridging  technology.

What I mean is that if you break down the jabber *platform* it could be seen
as four general areas , JabberD - "the transports" - the XML protocol - and
client/agents. Now if you were to shift the transport function from the
server to the nodes of  various peer to peer systems, and leverage the
Jabber XML protocol as a way to establish a common data representation to
transmit session information and serialized data among these, you'd have the
basis for a  peer to peer exchange technology. Jabber could serve as a
system used to harmonize peer to peer communication. - and it would be just
that easy too  ; )

For instance I've been looking into using Jabber to communicate with Groove
tools and "shared spaces".  You can run a jabber client , like the Jabber
applet, within Groove's web browser. Groove uses Javascript and VBscript to
bind its tool sets. From all indications you should be able to pass XML
encapsulated scripts and data, sent over a Jabber TCP stream, through the
client to the Groove environment - you can communicate between Groove and
Jabber.  Now this isn't really a peer to peer connection, and doesn't need
to be intermediated on the transport or session levels, but it does point
towards the role that Jabber could play in peer to peer communication.

Lets say you wanted to communicate between a Gnutella 'node' and a Groove
'transceiver'. This would require a component, similar to a Jabber
transport, which listened on the appropriate port, under the appropriate
transport protocol, of the alternate system.  The transport would also need
to be able to translate a serialized representation of any session and
control dialog which was being exchanged between these two nodes. Jabber's
XML protocol could serve as an envelope for this information. The respective
peer to peer systems would transmit their native transport and session
protocols across whatever topology they use.  The 'transport' module would
manage these connections and translate the received XML capsule for the
host.

I know this is pretty abstract, but hopefully you understand the idea.

$.02