[jdev] XMPP "APIs"

[Jonas Wielicki]

Hi Justin,

Not at that scale, but I have my small cute XMPP bot crowd which is
controllable via IM and does some small tasks, like controlling the
homemade public transport departure LCD or being a general purpose MUC bot.

It seems just natural to me to use XMPP for that purpose, however, I'm a
bit cautious with just accepting the XMPP servers authentication. I know
that I'm pretty safe when I'm doing that between my own servers running
on the same machine, but from outwards I could easily be MITM'd.

Still, the authentication aspect is really the one which I'm doing even
such small tasks using XMPP bots, because I don't have to worry about
the complex details of setting up a trusted connection, checking
passwords etc.. I just fire up my IM client, open a conversation with
the bot and I'm done.

In another project, we thought about using XMPP for a website commenting
service. We didn't come to a coherent design though, mainly as one has
to consider that not everyone has s2s-capable XMPP (which would require
an HTTP alternative) and that most XMPP clients are not made to create
longer comments.

Jonas.