AJAX XCAP client project started using SIP Servlet

One of the main advantages with IMS is the availability of user data including presence, location, preferences, status, group list information, authorizations, etc. Through the existence of this data in the network it is possible for all kinds of applications to easily access it and incorporate during execution. A presence application can get my group list from the group list server, get the location and presence of all people on the list and then display this information. The protocol used to fetch such information is called XCAP and is specified in RFC 4825.



XCAP configuration is stored per user in a XML repository. It can be part of another server, such as Group List Management server, or in a standalone XDMS server. You have to know which server the information you want is stored in order to access it. An alternative to this is to use central cache server that gather data from all sorts of repositories and expose that user information as XCAP. It appears to be a XDMS server but does not store the information itself, only acts as cache. Then administrator of the cache configures the physical repository for the information accessible through the cache.



XCAP is stored as XML in the server and is returned as XML in HTTP messages. Thus it is very easy to access the data using HTTP and a XML parser. Only parts of the document can be accessed using XQuery and thus subsets can be sent out when it changes. This makes XCAP very flexible for storing all kinds of user profile information, it is up to the application what needs to be stored.



Since the information is stored in a generic manner, can contain all sorts of user information and reflects in real-time user activities there is a need for a generic XCAP web client that can be reused in several different applications. Since the information changes in real-time inclusion of AJAX concepts is natural. Let me therefore introduce to all of you the Open Source project "AJAX XCAP Client" hosted on BEA Dev2Dev. Please let me know if you want to contribute. It will still take some weeks before we have anything real to show.