[JDEV] Jabber Client Design Tutorial

[Julian Fitzell]

On 24/09/2001 at 10:36 PM Julian Missig wrote:
>Well, in the few tests I did, whenever I asked for something like that,
>they would turn around and ask me if I meant their country or their city
>or what. However, this was most likely an issue of wording which deserves
>further investigation. Asking the user to enter a description of where
>they're connecting from doesn't solve very much since they still don't get
>a complete understanding of resources.
>
>Also keep in mind that nowhere does it state that a resource must be a 
>physical location. If I'm running multiple clients on one machine, I 
>think it would be useful to know which two clients they are using.
>
>What happens if the user sets up, say, sjabber and Gabber on their 
>machine, and both clients follow this question format? The user might 
>enter "Home" into both clients - hey, they're both at the same location, 
>why would you want to give them different locations, it's the same 
>machine, even! Then the user would not understand why they cannot 
>connect with both at the same time, and you have to force feed them the 
>description of a resource, and maybe they'll get it - maybe they won't 
>and just go on thinking you can only connect once with one Jabber account.
>
>Not to mention that fact that I'm not particularly a fan of always using 
>a resource to describe location. It describes your session in a unique 
>way from the others. In the future, multiple Jabber sessions from one 
>physical location will become more and more common.

Well, this is all true except that I suspect most people who can't grasp the idea of a unique identifier are not very likely to be running multiple clients at once.  Now I can see that in the near future they might be running multiple apps that are Jabber enabled... maybe these apps could adopt the convention of asking for a location and prepending it with the app name: "Gabber_Home"??  I do this sometimes myself because my friends know what features I have available based on what client I'm running.  Obviously this is a default that the user can override with any resource they want but it would be a more meaningful and unique resource.

Also, isn't a user far more likely to try to run the *same* client from two locations than two clients on the same machine?  In this scenario, they still won't be able to log in and won't know why...  hmm, actually, I guess the newer connection always bumps the older one... but if their first client automatically reconnects.....

Julian