14.6. Fifth Sprint: Extending the Server Component with Rosters

14.6.1. Analysis

Will, the marketing guy, says we need to boost communication among our users. Right now, all messages from a user’s contact are delivered to his client in one continuous stream. Whenever a user wants to respond to one of his contact’s posts, he starts his message with “@contact”, a popular convention on microblogging services. Although this way of communicating works, marketing thinks we should be able to improve the user experience for this, which would increase the “stickiness” of our service (whatever that means). So once again we sketch out some ideas at the whiteboard.

14.6.2. Design

We already mentioned that our server component gets assigned the complete posts.cheshir.lit subdomain. So far, we’ve only used the domain JID to send and receive messages. However, because we have a whole domain at our disposal, we can create as many arbitrary JIDs as we want. This means that people’s posts can come from, say, alice@posts.cheshir.lit or rabbit@posts.cheshir.lit, not just posts.cheshir.lit. Conversely, sending a message to rabbit@posts.cheshir.lit could prefix that message with “@rabbit” before posting it to your microblog, thus simulating a public one-to-one conversation in the microblogging style.