[JDEV] Jabberd 1.5 Development

[Thomas Muldowney]

Hey all it's about time for a new development cycle for jabberd.  This
will be under the guise of a 1.5.x series of releases culminating in a
1.6.0 release.  We won't officially start the development until 1.4.2 is
tagged in CVS but there is plenty for us to do before that.  My main
goal right now is to get the feature list put together that we're
working towards.  After discussing with a few of the jdev group idlers
we currently have this list:

- General cleanup and standards compliance.  This includes checking all
  the error reporting to make sure it makes sense, and all the other
  little oddities that have slipped in.
- Remove pth for a single event system, and a target of pthreads in the
  1.7 dev line.
- Better restarts and HUP ability.  This means that config changes will
  take effect and bring the accept/connect sockets up or down.
- Enhanced XDB layer.  If we remove our current semblance of threading
  we'll end up with a major bottleneck in the XDB retrieval.  One idea
  is to actually thread this layer and enhance the interface along those
  lines.
- Major mod_admin clean ups.  We don't have anywhere near enough admin
  abilities in the server currently.  This task will include enhancing
  what is there, adding more stats, dynamic configuration updating, and
  other utilities.
- Browse list updated based on actual availability of the agents.  I
  don't think I need to see this is needed =)
- One I just thought of while typing this all up is a build option that
  only builds the server with options that have been approved by the
  council.  This would currently be pretty lean, but it would supply a
  standards benchmark for other server developers to look at.

So, as you can see from the list this is not intended to be a massive
development cycle.  We have some more massive ideas (pthreads and moving
a lot of the library functions to glib for consistency), but we're going
to wait for 1.7 to do those.  My question for you all is what other
items do you see for the 1.5 line?  If you have some 1.7 ideas feel free
to throw those out as well and they'll get on that list.  Hopefully Ryan
and I can get JabberStudio (formerly JabberForge) to a usable state
shortly, and we'll actually house our task lists and feature lists for
the projects there.

One other note.  I'm going to be heading up the 1.5 development line and
development that generally focuses on Jabber as an IM platform.  Jer
will be around helping, but he is probably going to focus more on the
next generation of Jabber and the ability to use Jabber as a generic
platform for XML routing.  As ideas develop in the NG work we'll roll
them into the jabberd as necessary to enhance the IM platform and
continue it's growth.  Jer will post more about that work soon (and if
he doesn't I'll hound him until he does ;-]).  Let's get cracking!

--temas


-- 
Thomas Muldowney
email/jabber: temas at jabber.org
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