I’ve always wonderd if using XMLRPC over Jabber wouldn’t be the way to go while implementing a systems administration tool like StateEngine. It gives you several bennifits such as presence and dellayed receiving. However, I think there are about 2 people on the internet that actually use it. The examples that exist for JEP-0009 are for unmaintained jabber libraries. (Talking Python, of course.) To make matters more interesting the current jabber libraries for Python seem to only work with certain servers and server versions.

This boils down to Jabberd2 apperently sucks. At least that’s where I’m at today. The ejabberd server seems to work well with my hackings.

The latest release of Japperpy, which is unmaintained, has a very basic example of making Jabber-RPC go. However, the script is a bit broken and needed some TLC. (Don’t you love learning a new language or protocol with broken examples?) I fixed it up and stuck my version of jrpc.py on my web site. This code makes a Jabber-RPC request, bottles it up, sends it to itself via your jabber server, and decodes the method call request.

Next step is go get this example working with XMPPPY, a supported library. From there we’ll see if the Jabber RPC thing is actually worth the time.