Introducing the Jabber ID
In order to identify a user on the XMPP network, you need to know two things: the server on which they have an account and the account name on that server. So far, looks very much like an e-mail address, for example, marty@mcfly.fam
.
However, XMPP being somewhat visionary for its time-realized that people would probably be using multiple devices/clients connected to the same account, and therefore added the resource that identifies a specific client connection on that account. When we include the resource, we get what is known as a full Jabber ID, or full JID. An example is marty@mcfly.fam/highschool
.
The JID is made up of three parts:
Local |
Domain |
Resource | ||
marty |
@ |
mcfly.fam |
/ |
highschool |
Like e-mail, the domain part of the JID is case insensitive, but, unlike e-mail, the local part is also case-insensitive. XMPP goes one big step beyond this, however, and uses full Unicode for addressing so that JID can be made up of any number of non-ASCII characters...