[JDEV] AIM Transport & Jabberd 2.0

[Paul Curtis]

In deploying a jabberd 2.0 server, I've found a couple of things that 
need to be examined fairly quickly. The problem came to light using the 
AIM transport, but I believe that most others are affected as well. 
(not to pick on the AIM-t developers ....)

When using AIM with jabberd2, the AIM transport doesn't handle browse 
packets. In jabberd 1.4.x, this wasn't a problem as you could configure 
the JSM to respond with browse information as configured in the 
jabber.xml config file. Jabberd2 doesn't have this capability, and so 
browsing to AIM will produce an empty list. This is a bit disconcerting 
to the users, since they cannot browse to register with the transport. 
MSN is better, as it handles browse packets, and returns a response.

However, in the long run, the best solution will be to have AIM and MSN 
respond to service discovery packets. In the Yahoo transport, I added 
this capability in the last release. It was a fairly trivial thing to 
do, and has made the Yahoo integration into jabberd2 seamless. Please 
feel free to grab the discovery code from Yahoo ... in file 
yahoo-server.c starting at about line 293. In addition, you'll need a 
namespace define somewhere for the discovery info & items namespaces.

Since I have starting deploying jabberd2 at work, I'll hack something 
into AIM. Currently, I'm using the <browse/> element in the session 
manager config file (sm.xml) to allow for older clients to browse. MSN 
and Yahoo will browse correctly, however, AIM-t does not. With the 
<browse/> element and service discovery code in the transports, the 
problem disappears.

Let me know if I can help this along, as the browse/discovery 
mechanisms in jabber are extremely important to many users.

Regards,

Paul