[JDEV] Question about UserName and Clients

[Thomas Parslow (PatRat)]

> Thanks Temas and Michael. But I am still not clear, why we should not
> support this.

> Why not do it like email clients.
> Pop and SMTP servers run on a different subdomain machines.
> But Email addresses are always in the form of abc at xyz.com not
> abc at pop.xyz.com

> IMHO, The current client behavior is too restrictive. It forces me to a JID
> that is tied to the name of the server that I connect to. This is
> unacceptable to the customers who want to outsource their IM hosting to an
> ISP that does Jabber hosting.

> If the suggestion that I proposed is followed, then it becomes very easy for
> folks to contact an ISP that offers Jabber hosting to become jabber enabled,
> without disturbing their current web/email hosting setup. (And without
> getting involved in Packet forwarding between two ISPs). This is a real
> issue for customers who want the IM address to be the same as their email
> address but want to use a different ISP for the IM hosting part. This will
> help the nascent IM hosting market using Jabber to develop.

> All I am asking is that if the username contains '@' , then the clients send
> that as the JID. If not then continue the current behavior.

> The are benefits to my proposal (and a older version of WinJab was doing
> this too). What are the issues that outweigh these benefits.

> Regards,
> Ashvil

You can use SRV records much like e-mail uses MX records to have the
Jabber server running on a different domain to the one used for its
JIDs. So you have user1 at company.com but the Jabber server is running
at im.compnay.com.

You then need a way for clients to connect to the server, quite a few
currently don't properly support connecting to a different domain
(none support SRV records afaik). The way I've implemented it in my
client is to allow a username to be entered followed by an @ then the
correct domain for the JID, sort of like you suggest. The client will
then connect to the server specified in the server field but identify
itself using the the domain given after the @ sign in the username
field.

There is another way, I think it has something todo with using <alias>
tags in the jabber.xml file. Then a connecting client would believe
itself to be user1 at im.company.com but everyone else would see it as
user1 at company.com.

Thomas Parslow (PatRat)
E-Mail/Jabber: tom at almostobsolete.net
ICQ: 26359483