I’ve been thinking about writing some Jabber services or bots recently as we’ve been trialling a Jabber server at work as a replacement for the myriad different messaging services folk are now using.
I’ve been hunting round, unsuccessfully I might add, for something as easy to work with as PircBot a Java IRC Bot framework. Not that it has to be Java as I’ve been making baby steps towards learning Python.
Anyway whilst leafing through my copy of Programming Jabber I started thinking about Jabber’s extensibility and its use as an asychronous messaging component in a service framework. How might that be integrated with people-centric, desktop applications? And then I thought about Dashboard.
In the Dashboard architecture, cluepackets are used to send messages between front and back-end applications. Now what if there was a way to tunnely cluepackets through Jabber? Has someone explored this already?
There are some interesting possibilities here. Your front-end application may be talking to a backend on my desktop, e.g. whilst you’re browsing for new music a cluepacket may ultimately get routed to my local backend (RDF backed, naturally) which can respond with my reviews and recommendations.
Tie this in with buddy lists and you’ve got a neat way to mine a community (your community of friends and colleagues) for data without having to index it all in advance. For example it could be used to pull together calendar data so you can co-ordinate a trip with your friends.
Dashboard and Jabber
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Lost Boy 
The Jabber toolkits that I have seen so far do suffer from the typical ailment of excessive abstraction and avoiding stating a use for any purpose. Smack, http://www.jivesoftware.com/xmpp/smack/, looks to be a place to build something simpler. That is lacks MUC support is a hindrance for writing bots that lurk conference rooms.
Smack is really a toolkit for building clients, not transports/services.
For me by far the easiest toolkit to get started with writing transports was Yaja (http://yaja.sourceforge.net/) – it’s not been updated for a long time now and I don’t think it will, but it’s still what I use for any Jabber development.
Dashboard and Jabber
It would be trivial to embed a jabber client core into an application which sends Cluepackets to a transport which then does all the work.
Dashboard opening up wider?!
After doing several hours of deepseadiving and looking into Dashbaord I get a clue how it works internaly. A few days after that, I read about pubsub.com at ralphm’s blog. To me it sounds like a concept relative simular to Dashboard. And as a great fr…