Re: Jabber as a communications backplane

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On Monday October 20, 2003 11:29 am, Rob Kaper wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 08:07:10PM +0200, Adam Hunt wrote:
> > Have you ever thought of using Jabber as the communications backend
> > for monopd and it's clients?  It is XML based, supports detection of
> > client presence, allows for group chat, file transfer is possible
> > (bord layouts etc.) and of course it can handle simple IM.
>
> It actually came up in a discussion recently, so yes. I haven't given it
> a *lot* of consideration because I think there are more urgent issues to
> work on, but I'm not ruling it out either. A friend of mine is
> considering to write a Go game server using Jabber, perhaps I could
> benefit from his efforts.

I love that timing.  Yes, I've been weighing running games over Jabber.  
Being someone who's working on a Jabber client, my mind lately sees Jabber 
potential in just about everything.

To me, the biggest advantage in running a game over Jabber is that it would 
save client and server authors the trouble of messing with low-level 
network issues.  Essentially for free you get SSL-secured network 
connections with authentication.

The second advantage is that yes, it does solve the problem of how to do 
user communications, both person-to-person and groupchat.  I'm not sure 
how, though.  Do we want the game client to work with some external Jabber 
client?  Do we want to duplicate a hefty chunk of Jabber client UI in the 
game?

> I would be worried about overhead though, as well as the probable
> requirement for a local Jabber server (without one, playing on a LAN
> without Internet would be impossible, then again the same is true
> without a local monopd right now).

You already require a server, do you not?  What's the difference between a 
"pure" monopd and a Jabber monopd?  Other than size, dependencies, and 
bloat of the XML wrappers around the game messages? :-)

Yes, I don't know if it'd be worthwhile to take an existing game and move 
it to Jabber, but I do think it would be worthwhile to attempt putting a 
new game over Jabber.

- -- 
Neil Stevens - [email protected]

"Now and in the future, we will support our troops" -- George Walker Bush
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