[jdev] Bonjour Chat (was: Lan chat)

[Justin Karneges]

On Friday 30 September 2005 07:13 pm, Tijl Houtbeckers wrote:
> The protocol is not documented quite that officially yet

Lately I've been messing around with iChat on my LAN, and I wrote up some 
notes about how it works here:

http://lists.affinix.com/pipermail/delta-affinix.com/2005-September/000419.html

I don't know how much of this is known or not, but maybe you guys will find it 
interesting.

Since Multicast DNS has a very "pubsub" quality to it, using it for presence 
makes a lot of sense.  Overall I think the Apple protocol is actually pretty 
good, and it goes way beyond what I would have expected from a company.  For 
once, a protocol has been designed based on existing standards in the first 
place.  That saves the opensource community a lot of work. :)

My only critique is that I don't see a clear way to extend the presence data 
(since <presence> stanzas are not used).  Maybe we could come up with some 
mapping of some common Jabber presence extensions to TXT strings, or find a 
way to just send presence XML over mdns (not as insane as it may sound!  
iChat already tosses around multi-kilobyte GIF avatars over mdns).

-Justin