Subject: [XCON] Chat and Instant Messaging in XCON

From: Lorenzo Miniero <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:13:18 +0200

Dear all,

even though this may be premature, considering the current status and 
slowness of the ongoing work here in XCON, I'd like to start some seeds 
of discussion upon a sentitive matter: chat and instant messaging.
As far as I remember from previous discussions, in fact, it was 
specified that this would have fallen in XCON duties and nowhere else.

That said, starting from some discussions I had with some people on the 
matter and from the issues which arose there, I have some questions I'd 
like to know your opinion about.

1) Being XCON a CSP agnostic framework, does this apply to IM protocols 
too? i.e., will we envisage a gateway functionality for IM protocols as 
we do for CSP? We've only talked about MSRP so far, but I'm thinking to 
protocols as IRC, XMPP, etc. as well.

2) Of course, chat and IM mean nicknames... should them be unique in the 
whole conferencing system or in a specific conference instance only? I 
tend to prefer the first option, but since the "key" to identify an user 
will be its XCON userid, this could be not mandatory (even if 
recommended...) and mostly fall in 'social' and security matters. 
Besides, in case we choose to have IM gateway functionality, potential 
conflicts and alignment problems on nicknames could arise which should 
be addressed.

3) Should nicknames appear in the base data model, or in subsequent 
extensions? And in both cases, how? Considering the gateway case, a 
mapping among nicknames in different IM protocols could naturally come 
from there, as happens for CSP URIs.

4) Will XCON file transfer functionality fall in IM field (since almost 
all such protocols envisage it), or will we address it in other ways?

That's all. As I said at the beginning, these questions are intended to 
be only seeds for a hopefully soon-to-start wider discussion upon IM in 
XCON. I'm looking forward to hear your comments and opinions about these 
matters.

Regards,
Lorenzo

-- 
Lorenzo Miniero, Junior Researcher
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica
Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II"
Via Claudio 21 -- 80125 Napoli (Italy)
Phone: +390817683821 - Fax: +390817683816
Email: [email-masked]

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:40:38 -0400

> conflicts and alignment problems on nicknames could arise which should 

I think nicknames would best be handled by simply getting an AOR from a 
suitable "nickname provider". You could actually register with this 
provider, or it could simply retarget requests to some other AOR you 
own. If need be you could bundle this with an anonymizer or use a 
separate anonymizer as well.

There could be some advantages to collocating such a provider with a 
conference server, but thats just an implementation issue.

	Paul