serverless multi-user chat

[David Weidenkopf]

Hello, I am hoping to get some advice integrating a new feature to pidgin. The short description is: serverless multi-user chat. We don't envision resolving all of the questions such a feature raises, but we will build a reasonable prototype that has the most useful properties of such a feature: mainly graceful handling of an unstable network, mobile clients, and no single point of failure. One way to look at this project is a hybrid of XEP-0045 and XEP-0174, Multi-user Chat and Serverless Messaging respectively.

We assume that we will need to build a plugin. Also, since we are planning to use bonjour for peer discovery, we want to leverage the functionality of that plugin in a reasonable way. Is there a reasonable way for one plugin to use another? Can you safely 'sublcass' a plugin? The other thing we are planning to do is to use XMPP messages as much as possible.

Some guidance would be helpful. We would like to do this in an architecurally sound, and hopefully acceptable, way so that the results may be contributed back to the project.

Thank you in advance for any help or guidance,

David