[jdev] Re: Implementing searchable jabber profiles

[Peter Saint-Andre]

In article <20050103104406.GB27663 at austux.net>,
 Jeremy Lunn <jeremy at austux.net> wrote:

> Looking into some options for Jabber Australia
> (http://www.jabber.org.au/).
> 
> >From the very beginning we were planning to implement JUD with a
> web-based frontend.  Though a year and a half later it still hasn't
> happened and there are some obstacles.
> 
> First of all, vcards are quite limiting for what we want to do.  For
> example, we'd like our search facility to act as a friend finder.  There
> are many things, such as age/gender/interests missing from JEP-0054 that
> we'd need for that.  Though I notice that clients such as Podium and
> JAJC implement fields such as Gender and Marital Status.

Well.....

(1) vcard-temp is extremely limiting
(2) we need to replace it with something better
(3) this will require (a) some new protocol, (b) a replacement for 
users-agent, and (c) support in clients

I lean toward using x:data as the wire protocol because (i) some Jabber 
clients already support it, (ii) it is generic (not limited to merely a 
vCard replacement, which is good for specialized communities such as 
dating and gaming services), and (iii) I don't really care what the 
backend data storage format is (database, RDF, or whatever).

I started working on a JEP for this but have not finished it yet. You 
can see the beginnings here:

http://www.jabber.org/~stpeter/jeps/profile.html

More work required, though. Personally I see this as a priority for 2005 
since right now it's awfully hard to build any kind of friend-finder for 
the Jabber network.

Peter