[JDEV] Peer to peer Jabber streams

[Michael Wilson]

Sunir Shah wrote:
> Michael Wilson wrote:
>> Actually (peer-to-peer being blocked) would be quite common in
>> productivity-land.
>
> In any event, a peer stream cannot be opened if a firewall
> prevents it, or a network failure occurs, or a client doesn't
> support the peer-to-peer protocol. In all these cases, the client
> is beyond hope. Do you agree? To this point I recommend gracefully
> degrading to sending traffic through the server.

Fine, but if the reason why you're using peer to peer in the first
place is that the server can't hack it it would probably be better
to degrade to not offering the service at all.

One of the things we considered adding to our Jabber proxy is a
'UDP fast relay' feature. Clients would be able to request a
relay connection and would be given a random stream identifier.
The UDP relays could then be handled very quickly by a dedicated
high-priority thread. However most of the things that this would
be useful for (whiteboards, keystroke monitoring; screen capture
is sadly not possible from an applet client) are not exactly core
functionality so we left them out of the initial release. Fast
TCP relay streams were also considered for file transfer but
again the limitations of an applet client prevented it. 

+--
| Michael Wilson               "Smart Applications - Tools for life"
| Java Developer                           available @
| Insight ASP LTD                   http://www.myopenapps.com
+----------------------Open Source Innovation-----------------------