Programming Jabber

Building the Reflector

We’re going to build the reflector as a component that connects directly to the Jabber backbone. This makes sense, as it’s a service that we’ll probably want to run continuously (and perhaps start up and shut down in conjunction with the Jabber server itself), rather than something more transient like a client-based ‘bot, for example.

Before we go any further, have a look at Figure 10-9.

Figure 10-9. Basic browsing in WinJab

This figure shows WinJab’s browser window, which, when first opened, requests the top-level browse information from the Jabber server that WinJab is connected to (cicero, in this case). This is the information in the <browse/> section of the JSM component custom configuration, as described in Section 4.4.3.8, which looks like:

<browse>
  <conference type='public' jid='conf.cicero' name='Public Chat'/>
</browse>

We can see just one icon, representing the Public Chat conference service.

WinJab sensibly uses this location—the Jabber server (specifically the JSM) itself— as a starting position for browsing navigation. From the description of jabber:iq:browse in Section 6.2.5, we know that each element within a <browse/> section is identified with a JID, in the jid attribute. Here, the Public Chat element has a JID of conf.cicero. If we click on the element’s icon in WinJab’s browser window, it would make a further browse request—an IQ-get ...