[JDEV] Status Notifications.

[Jason Diamond <sendangels@usa.net>]

I have a quick question. How are all of the jabber users that might have
me in their roster be notified when I come online?

As far as I can tell, it can be done two ways. First, I could keep a
list of all the users I want to be notified that I'm online. When I
connect, I'll send all of those users a status message saying I'm
available. This seems to be the simplest but less intuitive.

The second would require that the other users add my to the list of
users they'd like to monitor. Since I don't know who's added me to their
list, when I connect it's up to them to query my server to get the
necessary info.

A combination of the two could also be implemented. When a user adds me
to their roster, they could inform my server that they'd like to be
notified of any changes in my status. This way, I don't specifically
have to know who adds me to their roster. But it complicates things for
the server. It would have to keep a list of users to notify whenever my
status changed. If I'm popular, this could be a rather large list.
Quotas could be used to limit the amount of resources each user is
allowed to allocate. But that complicates things more than I'd like
them. One advantage to doing this is that I could possibly query my
server for the list of users who've taken an interest in me and
selectively remove people from the list.

Are there other ways to do this and what is planned for Jabber? How does
ICQ and AIM do it?

Thanks,
Jason Diamond.