[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Greg Boulter]

Hi,

I wrote another post earlier but I hadn't figured out the mailing list thing 
yet -- if it turns up, sorry, I really don't mean to post the same thing 
(more or less) twice.

I'm not sure to which list I should post, here or jadmin.

I've written a "jabber client" that is almost ready for use, it's hard to 
explain it so I'll keep it short. It does apply to the subject of driving 
adoption I think. I've dealt with jabber for a few years now, but never in 
the traditional jabber client IM way, I just used it as a socket server for 
my Flash applications. What I call my "jabber client" is currently in the 
process of being separated from it's former parent application and having a 
graphical interface "designed" (my designing skills are laughable). This 
means if you check it out you'll find things that don't seem to fit or seem 
out of place ... often those are signs of the separation of this as a 
separate, more or less traditional Jabber client.

It is meant to be run from the same host that has the jabber server running. 
In simple form it can be just one '.swf' format file. Again, this is sort of 
an "ungainly" thing as the client was originally meant to be running on the 
same machine as the jabber server, the idea being that there might be a 
thousand of us "users" each with our own client/server pair on the same 
machine. Again, at this point my client shows "scars" although they are 
harder to spot now. It was also meant to run within Mozilla which means that 
any platform that Mozilla runs on, my client will too. IE works alright as 
well.

However, the audio/video portion of it can be handled through a separate 
host. In addition to web-cam/microphone ability, it can share mp3's, jpegs, 
text, videos, sound. Also, it has voicexml integration so it enables 
telephone-jabberclient integration. Also a svg engine, an xPath engine, a 
regular expression engine, and various editors and viewers. There is a built 
in bot (a reworked alicebot engine).

It uses a xml format I call "swfml" and you can see and examine the format 
at http://swfml.net . If anyone views the examples, notice there is no 
visible sign of jabber. To see the raw application with only general 
configuration I keep a working jabber client at
http://swfml.net/abdullah/src/SWFMLFlashbot/fullscreen.php and to see it 
with a makeshift IDE at 
http://swfml.net/abdullah/src/SWFMLFlashbot/fullscreen.php?IDE=open . These 
both open in popups but you can substitute "regular_window" for "fullscreen" 
in the urls above to open as usual. There are also versions to allow the 
jabber client to be layered above a normal html page, this makes enabling 
jabber to be added to any existing html document trivial.

I can't take a lot of bandwidth hit, so if anyone wants to look at it fine, 
but if you want to play with it much then let me know and I'll get a copy to 
anyone who wants it. Of course it is in beta so don't expect a lot but I 
think it does pretty well everything, conference, search, vcard .... that 
you'd expect. The MSN transport works but I'm not encrypting anything so 
....

And, back to the subject, I don't see that jabber has to do the obvious IM 
stuff, I see making it perform much more transparently, within websites, not 
only jabber websites, but websites like BMW, or Nike, or Disney, or 
Slashdot, or the Spice Girls or any company and most of the time I don't see 
the user neccessarily knowing they have anything to do with jabber. I made 
one site where when the user goes to the site he is automatically logged on 
and using it without any clue that jabber moves the map or that jabber sends 
a message to the sales desk alerting staff that a customer is browsing their 
site and has pressed the "online help" button.

Greg.

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