Is anyone considering how to implement support for buddy icons in
Jabber? By this I mean the ability to retrieve from the server a small
picture of another user, to display in the buddy list or chat windows.
AIM has this feature. Ideally you would be notified in semi-real time of
changes to a user's icon, so they could alter it along with their status.
Simply storing the buddy icon isn't difficult -- I'd probably use the
server-side data storage feature making up a new namespace for the
purpose, and putting the image data as Base64'd CDATA inside an element.
The problem is how to notify people when the picture changes. Otherwise
other clients will either retrieve it only once (and miss changes) or
keep polling it (which wastes bandwidth.) Here the best answer I have is
to add an optional flag to the <presence> element that notifies
listeners that they should re-fetch the picture.
(I'm aware that the protocol list would be the ideal place to discuss
this, but that list appears to be essentially defunct, so I'm using jdev
instead. If anyone's interested in starting a discussion of this, I'll
gladly move that to the proto list.)
--Jens
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