On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 09:05:05AM -0600, John Reinke wrote:
> I was once told that groups could be created for distributed messaging,
> but I've not found a way to set them up, or a client that appears to
I posted a similar question (below) to the discussion forums recently, but haven't gotten a response. I've written a prototype bot using the Jabber::Connection PERL module. It only implements one group so far, but should be easy to extend. The group mechanisms pointed out by Jan all seem to have the common thread that administrators create the groups - that's also something I'm interested in.
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Ok, so I'm trying to get people on a corporate intranet using Jabber as an internal IM. One of the things that was needed was an easy way for users to send broadcast messages ("time for birthday cake!") for example. This is critical to acceptance: people will never understand the advantages of an IM if they never use it, and they won't start using it unless it gives them some benefit (being first in line for birthday cake, for example).
Soo... I implemented a little robot that tracks presence and relays messages it receives to all users subscribed to the bot's presence who are available. I used the Jabber::Connection PERL module. Pretty nice.
If I want to do this for subsets, I can provide a fleet of bots with different topics (help, lunch, tgif, etc), and people can sub to them as appropriate.
The question: am I re-inventing the wheel? I know there's a conference room thing, but the way current clients interact with rooms, people would need to have a room GUI up for every instance. That is unacceptable. Once you close a room window, the clients all unsub you from the room. I want something more like Zephyr instances, where you sub once, those subs are persistent across sessions, and a new window pops up if there if an appropriate message comes in. That is how the bot mechanism I describe above works: with the same GUI semantics as a chat - just because you close the chat doesn't mean you never want to get messages from that user again.
I think the conference room protocol would work if clients managed subs and windows differently, but I don't want to have to patch every client to do what I want, and the environment here is sufficiently heterogeneous that I can't feasibly limit everyone to a single client implementation.
suggestions?
