Programming Jabber

Chapter 1. Introducing Jabber

This book is about Jabber: the technology, protocols, ideas, and the philosophy. Jabber is about connecting things (users, applications, and so on) in an all-pervasive message plasma that flows between clients and servers, carrying content, structure, and conversations.

The spirit of Jabber lies in its openness, its extensibility, and its lean but generic nature. That it finds itself in the midst of all that technology that will provide the backdrop to the dawn of the next-generation Internet is no accident. Web services, peer-to-peer, XML encapsulation, presence, identity, distributed computing—these are all phrases that describe key intiatives and developments that lie at the core of the coming transition, and Jabber can and does play a central role.

This book will show you how Jabber works, what makes it tick, and how to bend and shape it into solutions that join applications and users together. This first part is a guide to Jabber’s technology and server. Part II is an examination of Jabber’s building blocks and a series of scenarios and scripts we call “recipes,” to show you how to deploy Jabber in a variety of situations.