[JDEV] my interest -- a few questions

["c. chris erway" <cce3@cornell.edu>]

hi.  yesterday i found the jabber.org site and i've been excited about the
whole idea since then.  i think i'd like to help out with a lot of stuff -- i'm
a perl junkie, however.  i saw the perl code included in the developer's distro
and i'd like to contribute some.

i've only had an hour or so to read the docs, but in thinking about the
architecture i've had a few questions:

a] it seems like a user can't switch between jabber servers.  i wasn't sure how
that would work -- if a user's favorite jabber server was down, would he be
able to switch to a different one?  if all his info/config/etc is stored on
that server, it would be hard to get that info to a different server if the one
he usually uses is down.  or maybe you have been talking about that on this
list?

b] can modules / transports be written in perl?  i'd love to help out, and perl
seems like a great language for writing socket transports, etc.  there are a
ton of perl modules that do everything -- pgp, xml parsing, etc.

c] if you want to use a, say, jabber--> AIM transport, would that be dependent
on your jabber server having that transport?  or, if it wasn't on your server,
could the message be forwarded to a different server that had that transport
installed?

d] uin's / id's / searching -- this might seem too simplistic, but, basically,
how's the "search for a user" work?  the jabber distribution model seems to
imply that no one server can know where every other jabber server is -- thus
would there have to be a central jabber "directory server" that every jabber
server would have to have a special module to connect to?

that's all i can think of right now.  i'm really interested in this project --
sorry if you've already heard these questions over and over again from new
entrants (put up a FAQ for new developers!).


chris

--
 .g$$g, c. chris erway         .g$$g, cce3@cornell.edu
 $$$$$$ cornell university     $$$$$$ class of 2002, a&s (undeclared)
 `S$$S' protium web design co. `S$$S' http://www.protium.com