Towards a more .8 Jabber Framework...

I've done the coding for the transition to the new framework architecture for Jabber, and I'm now testing it, trying to run down all the code paths, checking my TODO list, seeing what happens when I disconnect the network. Also got a bit of documentation to sift through and correct, which I'm doing right now.

I also want to once again look into the possibility of adding Jabber functionality to xml.rpc, since I don't need a connection reference any more. (I forgot to list this as another good reason to transition to this architecture.)

It's looking good; failure is still a bad thing, as some messages may get dropped on the floor, but I don't think I need to nursemaid the connection any more. Perhaps most importently, it feels significantly more reliable. So like I said, this should be the beginnings of production quality code. (This is a benefit to me being on the @Home network; I had to handle bad network connections early, I couldn't just brush the problem under the carpet.) I wish my IM client would restore connections so transparently for me!

The only bad news is that the conferencing protocols look to be a disasterous mess right now. A couple of the sample uses of the framework I was hoping to implement are looking mighty iffy. I had hoped to push your news to a group; it looks like you might only get it to a particular account. I was also hoping to implement something for Weblogs.com to easily push the updates out on Jabber, but without a highly configurable conference group (I'd want to make sure only the Weblogs.com thing could post, or it'll get deluged in spam), that won't happen. I can't even find a spec I can code to, let alone a sample implementation to test against. The right answer might even involve programming a module for the Jabber server. (I could do it, but that's a bit more then I'm willing to undertake.) I don't even know that the servers even have the capabilities I'd need right now.