I freely admit I am probably over thinking the problem for the moment, but there is some doubts that maybe I am not. The problem is my concern of overloading Pymetheus with non-command & control messages, specifically low priority stuff like a chat scenario between user A & B. A types “Hey B, how’s it going?” which currently would need to descend down to a chat handler, run through some sort of sanitizer, then interface to auth.realm.UserRegistry to find the specific user, and then push a message to this person.

Its not really so bad to do this and in a lot of ways, it makes sense. All the information and constructs to accomplish the task is there, but it would need to be immediately refactor’d out at the first opportunity for one single reason: scalability. If Pymetheus suddenly starts taking on more and more trivial tasks, one day I am going to wake up and have this monolithic super process that does everything and has a memory profile similar to a swamp.

The ideal solution in my mind is:
User A & B connects and should be granted Chat privileges, accounts are created or activated on a xmmp server alongside pymetheus which returns connection credentials to Pymetheus which passes this back to each User. A & B now connect to the xmpp server and can chat away to their hearts content. Alongside some of the weirder xmmp sub-protocols this solves a whole slew of things that must be implemented ( presence, offline messaging, event notification, etc ).