The typical use of the roster class is to display a tree view of groups and entries along with the current presence value of each entry. As an example, see the image showing a Roster in the Exodus XMPP client to the right.

The presence information will likely change often, and it's also possible for the roster entries to change or be deleted. To listen for changing roster and presence data, a RosterListener should be used. The following code snippet registers a RosterListener with the Roster that prints any presence changes in the roster to standard out. A normal client would use similar code to update the roster UI with the changing information.