Programming Jabber

Autoupdate of JUD

The Jabber User Directory (JUD) is a service that provides a directory service of usernames and addresses. The service comes in the form of a component—we’ll be looking at the component instance definition of a JUD later in Section 4.11 later in this chapter. If a Jabber server is running a JUD service, then you can connect to it with your Jabber client and enter your name and address details and query it as you would any directory service to find details of other people.

At the same time, each user has the possibility of maintaining his own vCard—we discussed vCards earlier in Section 4.4.3.2. In the same way that the server’s vCard can be requested and retrieved, you can request a user’s vCard, and the user whose vCard is requested does not have to be connected at that moment for the request to be fulfilled—the vCards are stored server-side and the Jabber server (not the user’s client) handles the request.

So in many ways it makes sense to align the data in the user vCard with data stored in a JUD. The <vcard2jud/> configuration tag allows this alignment to happen automatically; if it appears in the configuration, it will cause any vCard updates (that would be typically performed by users changing their personal information via their Jabber clients) not only to be stored server-side in the vCard but also to be passed on to a JUD.

Which JUD? Well, the first one that’s defined in the <browse/> section of the configuration, which is described next. Effectively ...