1. Introduction

Most site administrators use firewalls to protect their network from eventual abuse. Quite often such firewalls do not allow outbound connections to unknown and unused ports, including Jabber client connection port 5222/tcp, which makes it impossible to use Jabber services from inside such firewalls.

Several methods have been proposed so far to overcome this difficulty. The most reliable of them is Jabber HTTP Polling(1), which enables access to Jabber ports via HTTP requests.

Yet another method of accessing Jabber via HTTP is HTTP Connect. This method uses the HTTP ‘CONNECT’ command to establish a permanent connection to the remote Jabber server.

JOH supports both methods. The name JOH stands for Jabber Over HTTP. The package provides an easy to use proxy server for Jabber connections. It is intended for use by system administrators who wish to provide access to their Jabber serves via HTTP for those users who happen to be behind strict firewalls.

Footnotes

(1)

See http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0025.html.