[jdev] Using chat room as resource pool -- need advice

[Matthew Wilson]

We have a bunch of boxes (20 or so) that offer web-services to our
server farm of several hundred boxes.  Right now, if a box on a farm
needs to connect to one of the web service boxes, it iterates through
a list of all the web-service boxes, and tries to connect to each one,
until it finds one that is free to handle the request.

I'm thinking that a better model might be to create a MUC where each
of the web-service boxes are persistently connected.  They would use
their presence attribute to indicate whether they are available or
busy.

When one of the farm boxes needs to make a request, it would connect
to the chat, get the presence info for all the web-service boxes, and
then choose one of the available servers to send a request to.

In order to send the request, I figured the client could send a
message to the room and specify in the message which server process it
is sending the request to.

At this point, the server would
 * update its presence to busy;
 * handle the request;
 * put a message back into the chat room, with the request results;
 * update its presence to available

I'd prefer that the clients and servers communicate through the room,
rather than directly, so that I can just log the chat room and see all
the transactions.

A few questions:
 * Is this asinine?
 * Has anyone done anything like this?  Are there any hidden gotchas
you discovered?
  * Is there any reason to mix in some jabber-RPC?

All advice is appreciated.