[JDEV] Jabber Killer App: WCS?

[Bart van Bragt]

> If the goal is to tell everyone that Jabber is great, chat and news
> notifications aren't helping that much. They are great features, but
> the users don't know they are using Jabber. Jabber technology is
> still hidden.
Not if they are using a Jabber client to receive notifications and to Chat.

I've been trying to implement a decent chat service on my site for ages 
now and still haven't found a decent solution that's easy to plug into 
my user database. IMO Jabber would be ideal for this, especially with 
MU-c and decent Java/Web-clients. Even if those are only able to 
participate in a groupchat, they don't even need roster/presence/browse 
support etc. One of the advantages for myself is that the moderators of 
the chat don't need to have some limited Java client running, they can 
use their own Jabber client.

> What you're basically asking for is a slimmed Jabber server that any
> user could plug in to their homepage?
Nope :D Most webmasters can't install servers or even bots on a shared 
webhost. So having a slimmed down Jabber server won't be of much use to 
them. WCS is a component that you can add to an existing Jabber server 
which listens to HTTP requests and that can set HTTP requests itself.

Normally, if you want to receive messages from the Jabber network you'll 
  need to have some bot running 24/7 (but most people can't do that) or 
you'll have to poll for new messages (which is ugly and there are no 
implementations for polling (Jep-25?) for jabberd 1.4 at the moment).

If you have access to a server with a WCS component you can just send a 
normal HTTP request to that jabber server with PHP/Perl/JSP/etc to send 
a Jabber message and you can have a page on your site that receives 
Jabber messages from your users (i.e. with a new entry for a blog, a 
reply to a Private Message, etc) in the form of a normal HTTP request. 
This way the webmaster doesn't need to install bots or servers to make 
the interaction with the Jabber network possible.

> I think this is really cool. What docs should I read to get started
> with Jabber and to become the 31337 Jabber developer who could
> implement this in a day or two?  ;)
Just get Jabberd up and running and get an example script while having 
the Jabber/XMPP standard docs around :D Most bots are fairly easy to follow.

Bart