Programming Jabber

Browsing LDAP

Browsing, a relatively new Jabber feature (introduced in Section 2.9 and described through its associated namespace in Section 6.2.5), is an extremely powerful and flexible beast. Whereas many of the standard Jabber namespaces such as jabber:iq:oob, jabber:iq:auth, and jabber:iq:register busy themselves with providing context for relatively narrow areas of information (out-of-band information exchange, authentication, and registration, respectively), jabber:iq:browse is a namespace that qualifies, and therefore defines, a flexible container that can be used to carry all sorts of information—information that is wrapped in meaning and context and that can have virtually unlimited levels of hierarchy. What’s more, it can deliver information in a standard way that can be understood by Jabber clients.

Note

As of this writing, the only Jabber client to implement browsing is WinJab.

Put another way, it means that we can extend the scope of Jabber deployment to areas outside what we traditionally see as the “Jabber world.” The power and simplicity of the Jabber browsing namespace design means that we can adapt its use to whatever purpose we have in mind. As we push out the Jabber protocol and give entities within our networks the gift of speech and presence (in other words, give them a JID and graft on a Jabber connection stub), we will want to identify those entities as something more than a collection of hazy objects that sit behind Jabber addresses.

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