: [JDEV] distributed messaging

[Christopher R. Wren]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 09:05:05AM -0600, John Reinke wrote:
 > I was once told that groups could be created for distributed messaging,
 > but I've not found a way to set them up, or a client that appears to

I posted a similar question (below) to the discussion forums recently, but 
haven't gotten a response.  I've written a prototype bot using the 
Jabber::Connection PERL module.  It only implements one group so far, but 
should be easy to extend.  The group mechanisms pointed out by Jan all seem 
to have the common thread that administrators create the groups - that's 
also something I'm interested in.

----

Ok, so I'm trying to get people on a corporate intranet using Jabber as an 
internal IM. One of the things that was needed was an easy way for users to 
send broadcast messages ("time for birthday cake!") for example. This is 
critical to acceptance: people will never understand the advantages of an 
IM if they never use it, and they won't start using it unless it gives them 
some benefit (being first in line for birthday cake, for example).

Soo... I implemented a little robot that tracks presence and relays 
messages it receives to all users subscribed to the bot's presence who are 
available. I used the Jabber::Connection PERL module. Pretty nice.

If I want to do this for subsets, I can provide a fleet of bots with 
different topics (help, lunch, tgif, etc), and people can sub to them as 
appropriate.

The question: am I re-inventing the wheel? I know there's a conference room 
thing, but the way current clients interact with rooms, people would need 
to have a room GUI up for every instance. That is unacceptable. Once you 
close a room window, the clients all unsub you from the room. I want 
something more like Zephyr instances, where you sub once, those subs are 
persistent across sessions, and a new window pops up if there if an 
appropriate message comes in. That is how the bot mechanism I describe 
above works: with the same GUI semantics as a chat - just because you close 
the chat doesn't mean you never want to get messages from that user again.

I think the conference room protocol would work if clients managed subs and 
windows differently, but I don't want to have to patch every client to do 
what I want, and the environment here is sufficiently heterogeneous that I 
can't feasibly limit everyone to a single client implementation.

suggestions?
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