Browsing LDAP
Browsing, a relatively new Jabber feature (introduced in
Section 2.9 and described through
its associated namespace in Section 6.2.5),
is an extremely powerful and flexible beast. Whereas many of the
standard Jabber namespaces such as jabber:iq:oob
,
jabber:iq:auth
, and jabber:iq:register
busy themselves with providing context for relatively narrow areas of
information (out-of-band information exchange, authentication, and
registration, respectively), jabber:iq:browse
is a
namespace that qualifies, and therefore defines, a flexible container
that can be used to carry all sorts of information—information
that is wrapped in
meaning and context and that can have virtually unlimited levels of
hierarchy. What’s more, it can deliver information in a standard way
that can be understood by Jabber clients.
Note
As of this writing, the only Jabber client to implement browsing is WinJab.
Put another way, it means that we can extend the scope of Jabber deployment to areas outside what we traditionally see as the “Jabber world.” The power and simplicity of the Jabber browsing namespace design means that we can adapt its use to whatever purpose we have in mind. As we push out the Jabber protocol and give entities within our networks the gift of speech and presence (in other words, give them a JID and graft on a Jabber connection stub), we will want to identify those entities as something more than a collection of hazy objects that sit behind Jabber addresses.
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