[jdev] newbie: where to start using jabber as IPC mechanism?

[Gardner Pomper]

Hi,

 I am starting a project which might benefit from using Jabber as an inter-process communcations mechanism. I have been looking at books and searching the web for a few days now and I can't quite sort out where to start. My confusion is basically about whether I should use Jabberd 1.4 or 2.0, and what client libraries will work with each.

 I believe that I am going to be making heavy use of chatrooms, so that a human adminstrator can join each connection point between processes and look at what is going on. The book I have (Jabber Developers Handbook) is written based on jabberd 1.4, which seems to be fine, except that it is not clear that the conference rooms work with that anymore. The links to mu-conference on jabber.org don't seem to work, and the jabberd 1.4 page on jabberstudio.org doesn't give a way to get mu-conference, except for the windows cygwin download (i will be running on linux). Do chat rooms not work on 1.4 anymore? Is there some other chat service I need instead of mu-conference?

 I typically just get the latest version of whatever, to start with, so I was looking at jabberd 2.0, but it isn't clear to me if I have to run mysql also. What do I need for a jabberd 2.0 server (at minimum)? I am looking for something which is reasonably easy to evaluate, to determine if jabber is going to work for my project.

 On the client side, I am developing primarily in python. I have references to jabberpy, but that page says the project is dead. Will it work with jabber 2.0, or do I have to just use jabber 1.4 if I pick jabberpy? The other python interfaces listed on jabber.org are PyXMPP (which has a broken link) , xmpppy (is this the one to pick?) and twisted (which is too much to learn along with everything else).

 If anyone can point me to a good chat room to ask questions, I would be VERY appreciative. A 'how to get started' guide on a web site somewhere would also be helpful, as would a book recommendation for jabberd 2.0 (if that is the version I should be using).

 Thanks !!

 - Gardner