Hula and Jabber

I did a lot of thinking last night about a recent post by Dave Camp on the possibility of snorp working on some patches to backend Jabber to Hula. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen….yet.

So, just my high level overview, not knowing a lot of the internals of either, I’m thinking this shouldn’t be to hard. You are probably just pointing jabber at the ldap server of hula..right? And then work out pulling or adding to the contact list into the users address book.

Then let’s move it a step further and look at adding to this a client. Now, I know there are lots of IM clients out there, multi-protocol and such, but lets think of this in terms of collaboration via Hula. So we develop a mono based client, with a plug-in architecture. We need to take advantage of the xml routing as Miguel de Icaza pointed out. So we build plug-ins that support pulling calendar information from Hula (personnel and shared), a plug-in that supports iFolder3 (more integration with the identity store and user address book of Hula), and a plugin that supports Beagle searches from the client. (You would also want some standard plug-ins that support things like weather and such.) Jawaad pointed out to me that this may be doing a lot of the work the Dashboard is going to do. Maybe, but if designed right it could be made to be another backend that could be consumed by Dashboard. He also suggested maybe working out a new mono based version of gaim that would support all this…maybe.

So once that was all done, then work could be done on adding the idea of presence awareness to Hula…

It is mostly just pondering on an idea….or the blabbering on lunatic.

I think mostly the later.