Programming Jabber

Chapter 4. Server Architecture and Configuration

If you followed Chapter 3 through, you should now have a Jabber server of your own up and running. If you also made the configuration changes described there, you may be curious to find out about the other 99 percent of the configuration file contents—what it does, what sort of structure (if any) exists, and how you might modify the configuration to suit your own requirements.

On the other hand, if you want to press on with learning about the the protocol and looking at the recipes, you can safely skip this chapter right now and jump to Chapter 5. Whenever you want detail on specific server configuration, you can come back here at any time. Indeed, we’ll be referring to parts of this chapter throughout the rest of the book.

Despite the initially daunting and seemingly random nature of the jabber.xml file contents, there is a structure to the configuration. This chapter will take you through that structure, explaining how all the pieces fit together and describing what those pieces do. In order to understand the configuration structure, we examine the nature of the server architecture itself. This architecture is reflected in that structure, and if we are to understand the latter, it helps to understand the former.

Indeed, in order to take the best advantage of what Jabber has to offer in terms of being a basis for many a messaging solution, it’s important to understand how the server works and how you as a programmer fit in. Jabber ...