[JDEV] Re: jabberwebclient

[David 'TheRaven' Chisnall]

Adrian,

I've written a partial client (only supports basic chat and presence 
information, and is /really/ flakey due to some bugs in expat) in PHP 
using a very simple java app on the server which connects to the jabber 
server and provides buffered socket forwarding (so the server sees a 
persistent client connection, and the client can grab any new data every 
time it runs). This approach seems to (mor or less) work, but has some 
limitations, so I've abandoned the project and started re-implementing 
moving the jabber logic to a native (non-web based) helper program, 
placing messages in a database, which are then grabbed by the web 
component (in PHP).
With regard to the update speed, I found that updating every 30 seconds 
was fine, as long as your send-message box was in a different fram to 
the frame which reloads (people get very upset if the page reloads and 
they lose the message they were typing).

As an aside, it would be very easy to implement a web client if the 
jabber protocol had been /slightly/ differently designed, so that 
sending a </stream> element did not automatically set an offline 
presence, so you could have a single jabber conversation over multiple 
(sequential) streams (actually, it has been sugested to me that every 
message (or group of simultaneous messages) sent in either direction 
should be enclosed in its own <stream>, so each participent always had a 
complete XML document.  /me ponders submitting a JEP to that effect.

Regards
Dave
JID: theraven at sucs dot org