This book is about Jabber. The technology, the protocols, the ideas, and the philosophy. Jabber is about connecting things - users, applications, etc. - in an all-pervasive message plasma that flows between clients and servers alike, carrying content, carrying structure, carrying conversations.

The spirit of Jabber lies in its openness, its extensibility, and its lean but generic nature. That it finds itself in the midst of all that technology that will provide the backdrop to the dawn of the next generation Internet is no accident. Web services, peer-to-peer, XML encapsulation, presence, distributed computing—these are all phrases that describe key intiatives and developments that lie at the core of the coming transition, and Jabber can and does play a central role.

In this book, we'll learn about how Jabber works, what makes it tick, and how to bend and shape it into solutions that join applications and users together. Part I is a guide to Jabber's technology and building blocks. Part II is a series of scenarios and scripts we call 'recipes', to show you how to deploy Jabber in all manner of situations.

To help us get in the mood, there follows an imaginary Jabber-based conversation between a couple of friends, Jim and John, and two 'assistant' applications at their respective places of work.