Programming Jabber

Splitting Up Jabber Server Processes

As well as being able to lump multiple Jabber server identities in the form of virtual hosting onto a single Jabber server and its corresponding monolithic process, you may also go in the opposite direction and split up a single Jabber server into multiple processes. These processes interact through TCP socket connections and so it’s possible for them to run on the same or different physical hosts.

How is this achieved? Well, revisiting the ideas from the start of this chapter, we consider that a Jabber server is a daemon (jabberd) and a set of components that provide the services. Taking one step away from the “classic” Jabber server model, which contains components such as the ones described in Section 4.1 at the start of this chapter, we can imagine a Jabber server where jabberd controls just one component, say the Conferencing component.

How much use is a Jabber server with a single Conferencing component? Not much. But when linked together with another Jabber server, we can see that this is a way to split off components and run them independently.

Taking the Conferencing component as an example candidate for ostracism, let’s have a look at what we need to do.