Norman Rasmussen schrieb:
A 'cool' feature here would be that each client can use their own conference server to connect to (i.e. lluna uses the lluna chat server, and sametime uses the sametime chat server). Then it would be neat to 'link' the lluna and the sametime chat servers together (very much IRC servers are linked together).
There is no such thing as a LLuna server. Currently we are hosting most chat channels for LLuna, because Web sites do not care and we wnat that it works everywhere. But when there are many users, then Web sites will care and they will host there chats on their own servers. Also there will be more total traffic and we will not be able to provide the default chat server for all Web sites. Hopefully default channels will then be hosted by volunteers.
My proposal to link SamePlace and LLuna is that we agree on the way how Virtual Presence clients get the chat channel address from the document URL. The proposal is documented in the JEP. This proposal is open to other chat protocols than Jabber. A Web site could decide to host their chat on IRC. Jabber is a good choice, but IRC has other advantages.
Our proposal to connect SamePlace, LLuna and others is to agree on the URL mapping process.
This way you would get redundancy, but I'm not sure how practical it is. The biggest problem with any centralised architecture is that it's centralised. This almost needs a distributed p2p rendezvous-style MUC server implementation.
We are trying hard to avoid a centralized architecture. This is one reason why we use Jabber. There are millions of Web servers and we want millions of chat servers, which host the chat on these web server. And there are (well, will be) hundreds of millions of virtual presence clients conneted to millions of Jabber servers. Everything should be distributed in such a large system.
Not that it is impossible to host millions of clients with a centralized architecture. AOL and MSN demonstrated that it works very well with lots of IM clients. But we WANT it to be distributed so that no single company controls the system.
hw -- Dr. Heiner Wolf bluehands GmbH & Co.mmunication KG http://www.bluehands.de/people/hw +49 (0721) 16108 75 -- Jabber enabled Virtual Presence on the Web: www.lluna.de Open Source Future History: www.galactic-developments.de
