[JDEV] Webpresence revisited [Was: JabberCentral]

[Michael Brown]

Agreed 100%.  This is the problem I have.  Everytime I bring up the topic of
webpresence someone directs me to a script someone has written years ago
that basically implements a mini-Jabber client in Perl or PHP behind a
website, and sends and receives presence packets and rosters and what have
you.

This is overkill for what I am wanting here.

Consider the ICQ email sig as an example [yes I know - HTML Email is evil
etc].  Every time you send an email, a small block of HTML is appended which
displays a graphic indicating your current ICQ presence.  This is very easy
to do for AOL because there is only a single server (farm) so my presence is
already known and the correct graphic is just loaded into the email client.

What I don't (obviously) want each time I read an email, is for my email
client to somehow log onto my Jabber server, subscribe to the senders JID,
retrieve their roster and check their presence before displaying an icon.
Even if this could work it would be horrible.

As Richard pointed out, something like what I have proposed falls down in
assuming that everyones Jabber server is capable of serving an image - which
is never going to happen as long as we don't have a standardised way of
doing this, and some sort of default WebPresence agent included in the
standard Jabber server code - which would (at the very least) require a JEP.

Which is why I am posting here - in case anyone has any good ideas how to
solve this...  otherwise it is just another cool feature that
ICQ/AIM/MSN/Yahoo have that Jabber can't do, and another reason why your
average user won't bother switching.  (Not to mention the free advertising
that those services are getting at the bottom of everyones emails, and on
millions of webpages that we are missing out on)

Michael.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard Dobson"
> Sorry but IMO that is a very bad way to implement it as it will generate a
> lot of traffic as people will keep getting online and unavailable presence
> notifications everytime the webpage is accessed which could really annoy
> people (and IMO is an abuse), plus it will possibly create a high load on
> the jabber server being used because of the constant log ons and log offs,
> the only way it should ever be done is by a persistently running program
so
> that abusive presence traffic does not happen, e.g. Ralph Meijer's
presence
> bot available on his site which powers his world map
> http://www.ralphm.net/?language=en, or my own one that powers my status on
> my website.
>
> Richard
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David 'TheRaven' Chisnall">
> > I wrote a PHP presense icon script a year ago.  It required that the
> > site had a jabber account (called 'WebPager' or something).  Each user
> > that wanted to use it added that user to their roster, and it would log
> > on, detect presence and log off whenever a page was loaded.  It could
> > also parse the roster and send and receive messages, although the
> > receiving component was not used for the presence, but rather to allow
> > people behind firewalls to use a simple web interface.  I got distracted
> > before I got around to deploying it, but I probably will this summer.
> >  At that point I'll also open up the code, in case anyone wants it.  It
> > implemented all of the functionality of the ICQ web pager (you could
> > even use it as an ICQ web pager if you had the ICQ transport set up
> > correctly...), and a few other bits.  The only server support it
> > required was an account created for it to use, so it could use a public
> > server if required.