Re: Has Anyone Proposed Net_Jabber Lately?

Robert P Peake wrote:

Philippe Jausions wrote:

I know there are several existing Jabber-client PHP classes out there. You should ask the author(s) if they want to bring one of them up to PEAR standard. I don't know how good (or bad) these are though. A Net_Jabber package would certainly be a very good thing... I also wish I had time available to help with, but at this point it ain't happening ;-) -Philippe

If only someone else paid our bills so we could code open source all the time! :)

No kidding :-)

I have looked at a few of the Jabber classes written in PHP. The ones I have seen have been ok but not great quality, and all of them have used inisecure plain text authentication methods. Not something we should encourage.

Agreed, and the No-Knowledge method is not very appropriate for a package that could open-close the connection often.

What got me excited again about this project is PHP 5.1's support for switching in and out of TLS without having to close the stream. I'm not sure if it's the same way Jabber wants you to switch to TLS for the authentication exchange, but if so, it would make secure authentication very, very easy. I believe digest is also reasonably secure and could be implemented in PHP 4.x. Now Jacques is talking about some kind of multi-IM package (like Trillian/Adium/etc.) -- wouldn't that be cool? Maybe if I keep getting people excited I won't have to write any actual code ... :)

I think that's a mine field. In any case, each IM service should be a package of its own. They are so different and not open-source, so maintainance would be a nightmare. What should be done is a common API (at least for all the basic features.) There's already Net_IRC, although I haven't looked at it. And why not leverage the Jabber-gateway feature to deal with other networks, that would cut down in resources needed to bring IM to PEAR. At least it would be a start. -Philippe