[DotGNU]Forum Update 21-12-2002

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

I did a load of thinking about Forum the last weeks, here are the results.

-- Frontended apps support --

As mentioned before Forum will support 2 kinds of applications, one of those 
is the frontended app. A frontended app is basically an application that only 
interacts with one user and has a frontend installed on the users client.

Because frontended apps are much easier to support and rather important since 
all the planned forum apps at this moment are frontended, support for 
frontended apps will be put in before normal app support.

-- Forum naming scheme --

Forum has a new naming scheme (the old one didn't function well given the new 
challenges). There are now basically 4 ways to refer to something in forum:
(D is definition, E is example)

D: forum://forum.host
E: forum://dotgnu.somehost.com
Refers to a forum as a whole. Typing this into a forum client will take you 
to the start node (the index node so to say) of the forum. Note that the forum
is a kind of virtual subdomain of the host, but since forum clients always 
take the first subdomain as the forum name this shouldn't cause problems.

D: forum://address@hidden
E: forum://address@hidden
Refers to a user in a forum. This can be used as a jid to send messages to 
the referenced user.

D: forum://forum.host/app/doc
E: forum://dotgnu.somehost.com/html/faq
Refers to a document (which is often called a node) in a forum.

D: forum://address@hidden/app/doc
E: forum://address@hidden/html/faq
Refers to a user through it's nickname in the chatroom of a node (this is 
something I added for compatibility with the Multi-User Chat protocol of 
Jabber).

D: forum://forum.host/app
E: forum://dotgnu.somehost/html
This isn't really a new way to refer to something in forum. It's just a 
reference to the index node of the application (it becomes 
forum.host/app/index).

-- Semi-integrated Jabber server --

Forum will provide jabber accounts for internal use, there are too much 
security risks involved with allowing external accounts to access forum.

Another reason for this is that the forumserver will act as an modifying 
relay server for the jabber messages: they are send to the forumserver first, 
the forumserver changes them and sends them on to the jabber server. This is 
neccesary because messages are send to a forum address using forum 
codes which has to be translated to jabber codes.

This also means that you cannot use your jabber account on a forumserver to 
communicate with jabber accounts outside of the forum, you need to get a 
normal jabber account.

To make this system work a preconfigured jabberd server will be send along in 
the forumserver package.

-- Jabber Multi-User Chat protocol --

The Jabber folks have extended the old groupchat protocol into a new JEP 
(Jabber Enhancement Protocol) called Multi-User Chat protocol (JEP 0045, 
http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0045.html). Forum will support this protocol 
as far as possible (sometimes the protocol comes in conflict with Forum on 
chatroom management question). I will try to get all functionality 
implemented, though some things may work different in Forum than in the JEP. 
Luckily the scope of the document doesn't cover management on a higher level 
than one chatroom.


Well that's it for this time.

Greeetings,

Peter