While doing the big spruce up on my servers for Dytara/whatthefuck.com, I've had the opportunity to play with a few things that I never had the chance to play with. Since I moved the primary web server from FreeBSD to Linux (for shame!), I can finally play with some of the Danga/bradfitz tools that have come out over the past couple of years. Since most of the cool toys he releases rely on Danga::Socket, which relies on Linux epoll(), I couldn't use them on FreeBSD.
One of my favorites so far is DJabberd. It's a pretty elegant and small implementation of the Jabber XMPP messaging architecture, commonly implemented by jabberd and ejabberd. It's no secret that I've tried to implement a nice messaging system for wtf, but it has been aborted too many times due to things being too easy to break into or a pain the behind to integrate. I was hacking together a custom bahamut IRC server for use by a private client for wtf, but this may work out much better. In the distribution, I have built in interop with GTalk, LJTalk, and many other networks (meaning your whatthefuck.com IM account can talk to people on LJTalk or GTalk), instant authentication against my own user database, and a nice plugin architecture that will allow me to create hooks into services on the web site, right out of the chat client. I have an army of clients that support it, from Psi and Trillian on Windows to Adium and iChat on OS X, to about 300 clients on Linux. :D
Hell, I can even connect from a Newton and my Nokia 770.
Anyhow, if any of you are on wtf and want to just try it out and see what happens, feel free to login with username@whatthefuck.com and your wtf password. All of the standard config should apply -- port 5222, SSL enabled, can use anything as a resource. Your connect server is also 'whatthefuck.com'.
Danga::Socket can use IO::KQueue instead of epoll, so it works with FreeBSD's kqueues.
At least in theory. Other people have submitted the patches and I haven't tested them ever (or recently), but it should work?
Interesting. Just goes to show I need to start looking harder. All of the Googling I did back when I first tried to use any of the fun tricks utilizing Danga::Socket pointed to requiring Linux, except for specialized cases for other tools, not necessarily DJabberd. Either way, primary web is running Linux now, so I don't have to mess around too much. Thanks!