Programming Jabber

A Simple Jabber-Based Address Book

With the availability of many different off-the-shelf Jabber clients and the use of these clients as generic tools to interact with diverse Jabber-based services, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Jabber can also be used to contribute to infrastructure solutions. That is, applications and utilities can be built using the Jabber protocols, in conjunction with Jabber server-based services, without the need for a Jabber client.

By way of illustration, let’s build a simple two-level address book using Jabber services. We’ll call it Demo::JBook. We’ll use this address book to look up details of our friends and colleagues while we’re on the move. The ideal platform for this is going to be a web browser, in that it’s accessible from personal workstations, airport web consoles, cybercafés, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) that offer access to the Internet.

The point of this illustration is not to show that there’s a single solution to the problem of disconnected, incompatible, and unsynchronized directory information (because, despite any answers that you may get to the contrary—no such solution exists). Instead, the goal is to show that it’s possible to make use of Jabber services and get to information stored and managed by those services without having to use a Jabber client.