[Gllug] Jabber Servers

[Walter Stanish]

Some limited experience.

I've used jabberd2 quite a bit and have found it OK, however I
am using it with a relatively complex configuration to support
custom authentication and 'c2s' crashes seemingly randomly,
requiring a complete daemon restart.  Additionally, my 
distribution's standard run control scripts do not seem to
kill it properly and I wind up having to 'kill -9' to 
re-instate order.

I've been using a few versions over the last couple of years.

To be fair to the developers, newer versions may have this
issue fixed, and it could also be due to temporary network
conditions preventing (remote, SQL-based) auth working with
my custom authentication code...

Overall experience has been 'not quite nice enough 
documentation' coupled with 'painfully complex multi-daemon
architecture' but with much flexibility.

If I were to implement again I would definitely consider
ejabberd or an alternative daemon, I can't remember why I
didn't use this in the first place, could have been the
authentication requirements.

More generally: XMPP totally rocks, people should be using
it a lot more!  It's very useful to have your systems send
you IMs when events occur ($$$-related, especially!), we
also use it for hylafax server send-state reporting (busy,
redial, fail, etc.) and this works beautifully.  Also,
running an XMPP server on your own infrastructure is a more
secure alternative to using Skype etc. for intra-
organisational communications.  Finally, anyone considering
an (excuse the buzzword) enterprise service bus style
architecture (IMHO these things *do* become useful at a
certain point, they're not just hogwash and provide much
better routing/debugging/reliability/policy manipulation
than point to point RPC services) could do worse than
consider XMPP as a transport - "it's the new SMTP!"

- Walter
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