[Opensim-dev] Groups and using our sims more

[Buckaroo Mu]

I'd have to put a big -1 on using XMPP for group chat. While XMPP is 
fantastic for user-to-user chat, and for small groups, it just does not 
scale to thousands of users in a single room. Let me give you my take.

I highly support using XMPP for IM. Each grid could have a single XMPP 
server to provide user-to-user and user-to-group-of-friends messaging - 
multi-person chat never gets larger than a few dozen at max, XMPP could 
handle this. It also, if worked properly, could allow for very easy 
out-of-world IM support - by providing the appropriate wrappers, and 
feeding credentials to the XMPP server, any XMPP-compatible client could 
load friends' list and provide chat. Links between XMPP servers also 
allow for hypergrid IMs.

For groups, though, I think IRC is definitely the way to go. Granted, we 
would need to wrap this in OpenSim code to allow for "room"/group 
authorization, notification, roles, etc - however, IRC is reliable and 
demonstrated to work for groups of thousands. Again, each grid runs an 
IRC server, and inter-server links allow for hypergrid group chats. 
Perhaps (this is a big perhaps, I've never dug into the details) OpenSim 
could provide some sort of ident server to assist authentication.

Discuss :>

Mike Mazur wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Kyle Hamilton <aerowolf at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> why can't we implement XMPP's group, messaging, and presence
>> notifications?  It might break backward compatibility with the current
>> MessageServer, but it seems to be essentially already a solved
>> problem.
>>
>> XMPP also has the added benefit that anyone can be a server on the
>> XMPP network.
>>     
>
> I second this. From what I understand, XMPP is optimized to deliver
> small snippets of information, any information, to many concurrent
> users effectively.
>
> Looking forward I see a distributed model (HyperGrid) for virtual
> worlds, so the messaging system should also be distributed. I believe
> XMPP's got that solved with its decentralized servers.
>
> Isn't there already some XMPP module sitting in our source tree?
>
> Mike
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