hi I understand from some googling that this is the kind of topic which may rake over the ashes of ancient flamewars.
I hope that's not the case: if there's a simple answer to the question, so much the better! --- I am developing a distributed system which involves the transfer of *large* binary files. As, loosely, clients will wish to communicate amongst themselves, under the supervision of a central authentication and tasking server, I'm looking at various alternatives for MOM. The issues are: - clients need to be able to cope with asynchronous transfer -- some will be offline at any given time. - the protocol needs to work effectively through a wide range fo firewalls and NAT environments. Pure p2p is ruled out by this (try selling in firewall changes for pure p2p to a reluctant client IS department!) - the system will use a mix of point-to-point and pub/sub channels. - the system must scale well. --- Jabber is nice. Very nice. And I can see that progress is being made on issues related to inband data transfer (JEP-0047) (IBB) and the needs for a firewall-friendly proxy (JEP-0003) (PASS). However both these extensions seem to relate to synchronous transfer (i.e. both clients are online and handshaking) -- although I'm not so sure that IBB won't queue (can anyone confirm either way?) Is there currently any way to use Jabber for to queue messages with a significant payload size in a resource-efficient manner? As suggested above, I want to avoid OBB to simplify the protocol, and to simplify access through firewalls etc -- it is infeasible to have peers sharing files directly over http or similar, and I would much prefer payload to be included in messages than referred to by them! --- If this seems too much like bending a perfectly good tool (Jabber) to a task for which it is inappropriate, does anyone have any alternative suggestions? I've been looking at xmlBlaster, which seems very flexible, but lacks a persisitant backend store (hence queues live in memory -- not good when queued data may run into the range of Gb). Have also looked at JMS, whcih seems capable of being bent into pretty much any shape, but at the expense of much work. Jabber is well thought-out. But can it help with my needs? I'm asking this on the DEV list solely becuase I need some input on your current views on Jabber futures, but with a heavy implementation slant - i.e not just good ideas, but ones that can actually be built! thanks for any help - darrell
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