Module hierarchy

Base XMPP features (RFC 3920, RFC 3921) are implemented in direct submodules of pyxmpp package. Most JSF defined extensions are defined in pyxmpp.jabber package and modules for server components are placed in pyxmpp.jabberd.

For convenience most important names (classes for application use) may be imported into pyxmpp, pyxmpp.jabber or pyxmpp.jabberd packages. To do that pyxmpp.all, pyxmpp.jabber.all or pyxmpp.jabberd.all must be imported. One doesn't have to remember any other module name then.

Constructors

Most of PyXMPP object constructors are polymorphic. That means they accept different types and number of arguments to create object from various input. Usually the first argument may be an XML node to parse/wrap into the object or parameters needed to create a new object from scratch. E.g. pyxmpp.stanza.Stanza constructor accepts single libxml2.xmlNode argument with XML stanza or set of keyword arguments (from_jid, to_jid, stanza_type, etc.) to create such XML stanza. Most of the constructors will also accept instance of their own class to create a copy of it.

Property access

Elements of XMPP protocol (like various stanza, roster or JSF extensions' objects) have various properties, like addresses, values, types etc. Those are values of apropriate elements or attributes in the XML protocol. In PyXMPP such elements are stored as parsed XML nodes (subtrees) or just the properties, however the API is supposed to consistent, whatever is the internal representation (which may change sometimes).

Common properties are accessible as object attributes and/or via get_* and set_* functions. Attributes access gives direct access to the internal storage or the cached value and will be usually faster, but for object using XML node as internal representation only get_* functions result is always up-to-date (attribute value may become invalid after the node is modified directly using libxml2 API).

Common methods

Most objects describing elements of the XMPP protocol or its extensions have method as_xml() providing their XML representations.