Programming Jabber

The Response

To complete our initial look at XML streams in a Jabber client/server conversation, let’s have a look at what the Jabber server might send in response to the opening tag from the client:

<stream:stream
    xmlns:stream='http://etherx.jabber.org/streams'
    id='3AFD6862'
    xmlns='jabber:client'
    from='jabber.org'>

There are a couple of differences between this opening tag from the server and the opening tag from the client—that is, above and beyond the fact that this response’s opening tag is for a document that is going to be streamed along the socket in the opposite direction from that of the document to which the request’s opening tag belongs. The first difference is that there’s a from attribute instead of a to attribute. The second difference is that there’s an extra attribute—id. Let’s look at these in turn.