[JDEV] FW: jabberbeans

["Patrick McCuller" <patrick@kia.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael T. Nygard [mailto:mtnygard@charter.net]
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 1999 11:39 PM
To: Patrick McCuller
Subject: Re: jabberbeans


> Hi. Been going through JabberBean source for about four hours now,
> figured a good way to start would be top-down: Build a rudimentary GUI
> and make it work. Nothing more complicated than a connect and a login.

Great!  Glad to hear it!  I tend to work from the bottom up, since I'm not
all that good with a GUI.  Having someone working from the top down will
really help flesh things out.

> Well, as I'm sure you know, the connect went fine.

Good news.

> The state of the code seems to be that packet construction is
> supported, and connection (only a small modification to enable the
> connection receipt from the server to be retrieved and parsed was
> neccessary). Sending packets and receiving them from an external (non
> org.jabber.*) source isn't there. That I can see.
>
> I was hoping you could help me understand JabberBeans's design a
> little. Class Channel is meant to abstract the connection to the Jabber
> transport server, but its interface only seems to allow for connection and
> disconnection. How will one extract and/or work with the packet pipeline?
> There's no mechanism for this that I can find right now. Either I'm far
> afield or it hasn't been implemented yet. If it has, please let me know
> where :)

You're quite correct.  A Channel represents the connection, and will fire
events to notify interested parties of changes in status.  It also acts as a
facade for the packet pipeline.  It may be necessary to add the methods that
will send and receive packets.  (To be honest, it's been a
while since I looked at the code...things got crazy at work.)  I was working
first on the pipeline, so it's likely that the Channel's API is not as
mature.

> If it hasn't, what's the plan?

Well, feel completely free to dive in and make whatever changes or additions
you like!  Please be sure to sign on to the project.  If you like it, and
have more time to devote than I do, I'm even willing to turn stewardship of
the project over.

> BTW, I appreciate the use of design patterns and automatic testing
> support in the code. Nice work.

Thank you.  I always find a complete set of test cases to be a nice "safety
harness," and I _never_ let my copy of GoF out of arm's reach!

> Patrick McCuller

Cheers,
-Mike Nygard