[JDEV] Suggestions

[dave@raystewart.com]

Greetings... 

I got the jabber source from CVS and have started my examination of it 
so that I could begin design on a client library. However, I've found
some other interesting topics that I believe we should probably
address first. It's primarily design issues, and I'm trying to give
constructive criticism. :) 

A disclaimer, this is *not* a flame. Please read responsibly. :)

To begin, let's start with a technique known as "commenting". :) I
code, so I know how much of a pain it is to put comments in while
you're hacking. However, in a project of this size, it is absolutely
*critical* that each person submit commented code. Now, before you get 
too steamed, let me laud you on the amount of design documents and
discussion. Great job! Be aware, though, that in order for the code to 
be maintainable, people must understand the interactions. For example, 
I have found little->no information on any of the lib/ functions or
types. What's an xpt_pool? What's it used for? What's a jpair? You
follow? 

So enough complaining, now on to the interesting stuff.

>From what I've read of the lib/ functions, it looks like you're using
async sockets, with polling, to handle multiple connections. Is there
a performance advantage to using this over threads & sync sockets? I'm 
not all that knowledgeble on async sockets, but I *do* know that
polling is Bad News (tm). Furthermore, it tends to make the code more
complicated, since each connection must be examined -- even if it's
not busy. 

Let's consider the jabberbox router for a moment. As I understand the
code (in my limited knowledge), the router maintains a list of
connections to transports and polls these looking for inputs. As the
routing packets come through, it parses the packet and forwards it on
to the appropriate transport. Basically, this is a producer/consumer
problem -- well suited to a multi-threaded approach with
semaphores. Utilizing such an approach would probably signficantly
(%25-%100) improve the performance of the router (especially on a
multi-processor system). 

Well I must go now, but I'd like to hear your feedback before I
continue. Maybe I'm wrong (it's happened before!), but I'd love to see 
Jabber take off. I believe it's the Right Concept. All we gotta do now 
is execute properly. :) 

D.