RE: [JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

[Todd Bradley]

Title: RE: [JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

Correct, you can't subscribe to a specific resource.

 

May I offer a few words of sage advice in this area?  If personalbuddy becomes very popular and you use the roster/subscription approach, you're going to soon start hurting your server (and it darn well better not be MY server!).  I know because I've done this myself with Jabberbot.  Jabberbot's roster on Jabber.com is about 10 times the size of the next largest user's roster.  Whenever Jabberbot tries to log in now, it causes all kinds of server mayhem because every presence change causes the server to go read and parse rosters of everyone in Jabberbot's roster.  This, and the subsequent traffic backups, crash the server at Jabber.com (which is JCS, of course, but I suspect the open source server would have the same problem).  That's why I turned Jabberbot off about a month ago.

 

One better approach is to have Jabberbot (or personalbuddy) be a server-side agent that has no roster controlled by the server.

 

 

Todd.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Colin Madere [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:02 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: RE: [JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

Good points, Jens.  I don't think you can subscribe just to a resource, though.  A nice thing which shouldn't be too much of a change would be to actually have to subscribe to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" rather than just send messages to it.  That way you can just remove your subscription to the presence and be done with it :)

Know any often updated projects on freshmeat so I can see this work?

Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: Jens Alfke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2001 11:42 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Request for comments on system using jabber

On Thursday, May 24, 2001, at 03:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

If you send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] saying "watch xxxxx" where xxxxx is the name of the package to watch it will send you notification of updates. If you send "ignore xxxxx" it will stop sending them.

I love the idea of presence/IM based services like this, but I'm worried that we're going to get into a real mess where they're all driven by text messages using various different syntaxes ... which is of course exactly what happened in the e-mail world with list servers. (I just read a news article yesterday about a new AIM based agent for Radiohead fans that sounds like it's running some kind of Eliza-like "natural language" interface. Be very afraid.)

In the case of your personalbuddy, I can easily see people later deciding they don't want the notifications anymore but not being able to remember the magic "ignore" command. They'd then get mad at the agent for spamming them.

Wouldn't it be cleaner to use the existing Jabber subscription model for this rather than inventing your own? I.e. you subscribe to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"'s status and it will send you messages when xxxxx is updated. To stop getting updates, unsubscribe. (The status message in the presence could indicate the current version number.)

Of course this requires that you run your own Jabber server at alsutton.com, which you might not be willing or able to do. Is it possible in Jabber to subscribe to a single resource? If so, then perhaps people could subscribe to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]/xxxxx" to get notifications for package xxxxx.

�Jens