[jdev] Discovering the Federation.

[Cedric Hyppolite]

Hi,

I am wondering if it's possible to discover the Jabber server  
federation starting by only one jabber server.
I would like to put a jabber server name in the client, and ask the  
server the list of other jabber servers it knows.
Then I could select one and ask him its features... The idea behind  
this is to let a user new to Jabber browse the network to find a  
jabber server providing all the features that he needs (gateway, user  
registry, conference rooms) and then register an account in-band. In  
a perfect world the server statistics (uptime, ping) would be  
available through the discovery protocol, but I may be asking too much.

Is this server federation discovery possible with Jabber?

I have always thought that such a feature was missing from IRC,  
especially with so many networks/servers available. So hopefully with  
Jabber this is possible in some way.

I am currently using the Smack API, if such server federation  
discovery is possible using specially crafted stanzas, an example  
using Smack would be perfect.

Thanks in advance,
Cédric