[jdev] Serverless (peer2peer) jabber sessions

[Jacek Konieczny]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 10:24:41AM -0500, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> 1. Gain access to a Mac
> 2. Start up iChat in Rendezvous mode
> 3. Have fun!
> 
> The main use case for this kind of thing is chatting with people at
> events and conferences (I've used it at IETF meetings). 

I think that on such events, especially big ones, the much better
solution is a local Jabber server and a way for the clients to
automatically discover it. peer-to-peer networking and multicasting may
only cause a lot of problems and some limitations to the XMPP protocol.
And such conferences usually already have some (temporary) IT
infrastructure including people who are able to set up such server.

> It'd be nice
> on a LAN, too, but you can just as easily run a little server for your 
> workgroup.

IMHO home or small office LAN is a more typical usage for such
solutions. Such network does not have a dedicated server, workstations
may be often offline and setting up a server for only a few workstation
doesn't make sense.

I thing peer-to-peer networking may be useful sometimes, but a way to
discover (automatically, with no client configuration) a local Jabber
server for a LAN/domain would be much more useful in many cases -- less
changes in clients and all XMPP features available.

Greets,
	Jacek