Programming Jabber

Browsable service information

As the Jabber server administrators, we know what services are available on our Jabber server: what components are connected and what features they offer. We know that we’re running a JUD locally and have a Conferencing component.

But how do we let the Jabber clients know? If they’re to be able to provide their users with an agreeable experience and expose them to all the server features and services available, we need some way to allow them to request information about what the server that they’re connected to offers. Jabber has a powerful feature called browsing that allows one entity to query another entity for information. Browsing defines a simple request/response exchange and with that provides a singular and uniform way to retrieve (on the requester’s part) and expose (on the requestee’s part) feature information and availability.

Bearing that in mind, we can guess what the <browse/> section of the JSM custom configuration is for:

<browse>
  <service type="jud" jid="jud.yak" name="yak User Directory">
    <ns>jabber:iq:search</ns>
    <ns>jabber:iq:register</ns>
  </service>
  <conference type="public" jid="conference.yak" name="yak Conferencing"/>
</browse>

Each child of the <browse/> tag defines a feature, in this case a “service,” that the Jabber server offers. Of course, these services are the ones over and above the services provided by the basic components such as Session Management, Hostname Resolution, and so on.

Two services are defined (“exposed”) ...