Programming Jabber

Chapter 10. Pointers for Further Development

The previous two chapters have demonstrated how Jabber can be used to build applications and solutions in many functional areas. They expanded upon and indeed went beyond the theme of instant messaging (IM) to employ the fundamental features of contextual messaging, presence, and request/response sequences, in a wide range of scenarios.

While these scenarios have in some ways been inward looking, they are natural progressions that originated inside the IM world and matured into applications and solutions that retain much of the messaging flavor. Let’s consider what else Jabber has to offer as a messaging and routing mechanism.

This chapter explores some “outward looking” scenarios, to give you pointers and ideas for the future. With Demo::JBook, we consider the possibility of “Jabber without Jabber”—in other words, using Jabber as an infrastructure, in this case as a data store, without focus on any particular Jabber client or IM functionality. We also explore how Jabber is the perfect transport partner for procedure calls formalized in XML: JabberRPCRequester and JabberRPCResponder are scripts that exchange method calls and responses encoded in XML-RPC.

Using Jabber as a conduit to foreign systems is also a theme of this chapter. With ldapr, we build a script that reflects the hierarchy and contents of an LDAP data store, allowing that store to be navigated from a Jabber client. Finally, we look to the business world, employing Jabber ...