Jabber: The File System

Posted by Trejkaz Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:00:00 GMT

This just in, development of a Jabber File System for Linux, sitting on top of FUSE, which may soon be merged into the mainline Linux kernel (FUSE may soon be integrated, that is, not the Jabber filesystem.)

It seems to have been developed reasonably hastily and thus is probably still a bit rough around the edges, but already you can do things like this:

ls /mnt/jabberfs
echo 'Hi, how are you?' > /mnt/jabberfs/bob.example.com/messages

There are a few instantly recognisable issues, but they’ll probably be resolved soon enough:

  • “messages” is just a file which contains all messages, instead of a directory where multiple messages sit like in Maildir;
  • replacing the “@” with a “.”, which is going to cause name clashes here and there (bob.smith@example.com vs. bob@smith.example.com);
  • no multiple-resource support yet.

But already, I can somewhat see the appeal of this. I’ve been wanting to integrate Jabber support into Rails lately, and to do that, I would normally need to make some kind of ActionMailer lookalike, where I run a script that connects to Jabber and spins around, creating objects in the database where appropriate.

This sort of trick would let me do that without really needing to run a daemon… well, I suppose the daemon would be providing the filesystem.

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