[JDEV] Large rosters + a solution for the commands syntax problem

[temas]

As a note there is a draft for dynamic forms in Jabber, and I have
implemented it in vorpex (the new website system).  Part of the idea is
that if a client doesn't understand the forms system they could point
the user OOB to access the forms.

--temas

On 26 May 2001 17:03:01 +0100, Michael Hearn wrote:
> Hi, I get the digest here so sorry for the lack of quotes/threading etc.
> BTW, what happened to NNTP access to this list?
> 
> Anyway, two things.
> 
> 1) Large rosters. I don't see the problem here - why oh why does the server
> have to parse the rosters of all the people that presence is being SENT to?
> That's the impression I've got, maybe I'm wrong, but surely to change
> presence all the server has to do is load and parse that bots roster then
> generate a <presence> packet for each one which gets sent to the client if
> they are online or not, or to another server. There should be only 1 roster
> parse, or am I wrong? Anyway, I agree with Jens that this seems to be a
> major problem - client or transport the server should be able to happily
> deal with large scale presence notifications.
> 
> 2) Command syntax: Yeah, well I see this could be a problem. We can either
> continue using natural language for this, which is improving all the time
> but does have problems (as in: it can be difficult to know exactly what or
> how you can do with the commands/varied syntax) or we can use some kind of
> controlled input system like HTML forms only different. Here's my suggestion
> (I'll prototype it when I can):
> 
> Bots advertise themselves as supporting the commands syntax somehow (in
> presence?) and when a client that supports it beings "chatting" to this bot,
> what actually happens is that a special message is sent to the bot
> requesting the data (or it could be an IQ get/set system). This returns some
> XML representing the commands that can be used, which are displayed to the
> user as a series of linked phrases, like this:
> 
> (i'll use the freshmeat news example here)
> 
> * Start chat
> * A window appears that looks like this, here [] means blue underlined text
> like hyperlinks
> 
> [select option]
> 
> * The user clicks on the [select option] link and a menu appears with the
> Watch and Ignore commands, and maybe others like About etc.
> * The user chooses Watch
> * The window changes to read
> 
> From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source.
> [ and ]
> 
> * The (edit) is just a text edit so we can type in the words we want. The
>  and ] link gives us more options, like "and, send me a daily digest", "and,
> send me XHTML formatted news items" etc. The user wants both of these
> options, so they click the first [and], then choose the option, so it reads
> 
> From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source,
> and send it as a daily digest,
> [ and ]
> 
> 
> ... then ...
> 
> From now on, send me updates on the (edit) news source,
> and send it as a daily digest,
> and send it as XHTML formatted
> [ and ]
> 
> Now the user has created a request that identifies their needs to the bot,
> so they click OK or whatever and another XML message is sent to the bot with
> the data the user entered. The bot returns a text message saying, "Thanks
> for using PersonalBuddy, I will:  send you updates on the (edit) news
> source, and send it as a daily digest, and send it as XHTML formatted." to
> let the user know it went OK. The same interface can be used to unsubscribe
> :
> 
> [ select option ]   >   Unsubscribe   >    [ select news feed ]    >
> Freshmeat.net   >  OK
> 
> Anyway, I know this approach has some problems, most notably client support
> is required which sort of does away with the whole point of IM bots which is
> that they are like other people and all you need is the IM software, but  I
> believe it -is- powerful and flexible. Also I suppose that for clients that
> didn't support this or didn't want to use it (ie sent the bot a plain text
> message) it could go to the natural language interface. Anyway, comments
> anyone?
> 
> thanks -mike
> 
> 
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