[jdev] My outgoing jabber packet

[Anthony Ortiz]

> Remember that TCP is just a stream of bytes.  There are no packets, at least
> not from the application's point of view.  If you send a chunk of data, there
> is no guarantee it will arrive "all at once" on the other side.  The only
> guarantee is that the bytes will be in order.  It is not the Jabber server
> that is breaking up the stanzas into parts, but more likely the TCP subsystem
> of either the Jabber server or your client's computer.  Solid TCP
> applications should be able to operate even at 1-byte granularity.  Never
> expect "packets" from TCP!

Sorry, it was not my intention to imply that I'm processing "packets".
Jabber does, however, work over the TCP/IP protocol, which sends
information out in discrete "packets", and like you said, the TCP
subsystem takes care of this, so all we're concerned about at a higher
level is reading from the socket stream. In this case, I was simply
responding to a post regarding TCP packets and MTU size, and the point
he was trying to make was that my code would not work in the event
that I would need multiple socket.reads. I was pointing out that I had
already taken this into account and that my code was not expecting a
complete stanza in one socket.read call.

> Since TCP is just a stream of bytes, and XMPP transmits a fully conforming XML
> document as-is, then one way to look at XMPP is as if you were parsing a
> really long XML file.
> 
> You should now have enough information to decide if Jabber would ever send
> jumbled XML fragments.
> 
> -Justin

Thanks Justin, I figured out as much since that was the only method
that made any sense... I just never saw it implicitly written
anywhere, but maybe that's because it's so obvious lol!

Anthony