[JDEV] Multicast support

[Michael Wilson]

David Iodice wrote:
> Pardon me if this seems off the wall, but I was wondering if
> Jabber can support messaging to a multicast session.

I'm not sure if you mean a server-level 'announce' feature or
real network-level multicasting. 1.2 definitely didn't support
the former so we implemented it in our proxy server; this
allows the client to send a message to a virtual user that
gets expanding into a horde of messages (one to each user in
the group) by the proxy. It would be nice to be able to
simply specifiy multiple users in the message header (as
with CC in SMTP) rather than always having to rely on
sever-side user groups though. One for the protocol guys
perhaps?

As far as I can see Jabber can't currently support IP-level
multicast since it's based on conventional TCP sockets which
map to XML streams. However in theory Jabber is essentially
packet based; we were looking at an XML-over-UDP implementation
here which is theoretically capable of doing this but
unfortunately the project is on indefinite hold. Of course
if most of the hosts on a subnet are interested in the packets
it's more efficient to simply use the broadcast address. There
wouldn't be much point doing this anyway for conventional
instant messaging as the bandwidth requirements are trivial.

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| Michael Wilson               "Smart Applications - Tools for life"
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