[JDEV] Webpresence revisited [Was: JabberCentral]

[Ralph Meijer]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 05:16:10PM -0500, Dougal Campbell wrote:
> [...]
> 
> Sure, something similar to the P2P systems might be good.

Depending how you look at it, the server network in Jabber is a P2P network ;-)

> Decentralization is a strong point for Jabber. But J. Random User
> doesn't care about that. He says "when I used ICQ, I could search for
> other ICQ users, and I didn't have to worry about what server they were
> on." I'm not saying that a centralized JUD necessarily should be part of
> the official Jabber effort. I'm just saying that it could be a useful
> additional service, if somebody wants to set something like that up.

If you'd really want a global JUD, this doesn't need to be physically
distributed. Each server could keep its own JUD, and search queries could
be done to your local server, which in turn queries other servers.

Mankins has build something like into LLI using pubsub, following this idea of
mine:

- Client does query to local JUD component which is pubsub enabled
- JUD component sets up a instant pubsub node (basically with a random node id)
- JUD component subscribes the querying client
- JUD component publishes its own results
- JUD component also forwards the query to JUD components on other servers,
  along with the id of the pubsub node
- Other JUD components also publish their results to the local JUD component

Since the client is automatically subscribed it receives the pubsub
notifications from the JUD component with the results of the query. The
returning of the results via pubsub is done to have the results be returned
asynchronously. Otherwise, the client would have to wait until all other
JUD components have returned their results, and this could take a while.

I'm not sure, and mankins should correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that
the code for LLI should be easily adjustable for creating such a distributed
JUD as this.

-- 
Groetjes,

Ralphm