On 01/03/13 18:47, Mark Rejhon wrote:
> - A collection of laptops gets close to each other (WiFi, Bluetooth)
> - They all automatically join the same MUC
FWIW, telepathy-salut extends XEP-0174 (iChat-style link-local XMPP with
mDNS/DNS-SD) to support MUC-style chatrooms, using a UDP-multicast-based
protocol called "Clique" designed by Sjoerd Simons. It provides
consensus-based chatrooms (there is no "owner" without whom the room
cannot operate), causal ordering, and reliable message delivery
(inability to deliver a message to all participants within a reasonable
time causes a detectable error condition similar to an IRC netsplit).
The Sugar environment originating from One Laptop per Child used this
for serverless multi-user chatrooms, at least in early deployments (I
don't know whether they still use it).
The reference (only?) implementation of the protocol is open-source
(LGPL 2.1+). Unfortunately, the protocol documentation[1] is woefully
incomplete, and only describes the XMPP and mDNS bits, not the actual
Clique datagrams. If this protocol is suitable for your use case, we'd
welcome a second implementation, and any documentation you can
contribute - the canonical source for [1] is docs/clique.xml in the
telepathy-salut git repository[2].
Regards,
S
[1] http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/xmpp/clique.html
[2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/telepathy/telepathy-salut/
