[jdev] Discovering the Federation.

[Christopher Forsythe]

On Aug 29, 2006, at 3:59 PM, Cedric Hyppolite wrote:

>
> Le 29 août 06 à 22:08, Peter Saint-Andre a écrit :
>
>> Hal Rottenberg wrote:
>>>> Well, usually client developers download the list of servers  
>>>> before the
>>>> user ever logs on (so the user can choose a server). If we say  
>>>> that you
>>>> need to be connected to the XMPP network before you can get a  
>>>> list of
>>>> servers, then we have a bootstrapping problem.
>>>
>>> Let me come at the OPs question a different way.
>>>
>>> Why can't you use S2S to discover the meshed network of servers and
>>> available services?
>>
>> You can, I guess. But I thought this guy was looking for a data feed
>> that he could use to auto-populate the list of servers his client  
>> shows
>> to a user who has not yet registered an account with any server.  
>> So if
>> you need an XMPP server connection in order to discover which XMPP
>> server you might register with, then you have a bootstrapping  
>> problem, no?
>>
>> /psa
>>
>
> My initial request was to use XMPP to find the network. Having a  
> list of servers from the web is a backup solution, where I need to  
> do things myself instead of relying on a Jabber library package  
> handling most of the work.
>
> You could have a system where you can connect to a server without  
> having an account on it, and discover which servers he knows. This  
> information is not account specific and this is similar to account  
> registration which obviously does not require an account.
>
> To solve the bootstrapping problem, the client would include an  
> initial list of stable, well-connected xmpp server which would be  
> used as a seed to discover the full network, then select which  
> server to register to. The advantage of this is to have an xmpp  
> solution to use on all the steps from 'I don't know jabber' to 'I  
> have an account and I chat with my friends'. In the same way as  
> user directories are handled by jabber instead of relying on web  
> pages of user account info, server directory could be handled by  
> jabber.
>
> You can then imagine features in the client like selecting the  
> server based on values from the 'server statistics' namespace  
> including number of accounts, uptime, ping time, the availability  
> of off-line messaging, secure login...


I think it'd be nice to have something like this.

Chris Forsythe