server chat with erlang

[Tony Finch]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, Joel Reymont wrote:
> On Aug 14, 2006, at 4:04 PM, Joe Armstrong ((TN/EAB)) wrote:
>
> > The challenge is to elimiate the servers, making the clients
> > collectivly behaving as a server.
>
> I don't think you can completely eliminate the server. You need one for
> clients to discover each other, keep track of chat rooms, etc. Once clients
> connect they can proceed to communicate directly.

Also you need servers for finding out information about a user when they
are offline (e.g. their vcard, their custom offline presence message "on
leave, back in september") and for storing messages that were sent to you
when you were offline. A client-server model is also much more managable,
e.g. if you are providing a company IM service, and it makes firewalls
much less of a problem. The main reason that SIP is a horrific abortion is
that it tries to be peer-to-peer and had client-server bolted on when they
realised p2p wouldn't give them all the bells and whistles.

Tony.
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