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Jabber As The Coming IM Standard?
deran9ed writes: "Rocky Mountain News just posted an decent article regarding Jabber. "That makes Jabber the "best candidate for becoming the de facto standard" of the instant-messaging industry, Kobielus said, in much the same way Linux has been to the Unix operating system and Apache has been to Web servers." Article is written rather well for a change with comments on concerns of companies, and their employees use of other IM protocols (AIM, Yahoo), a brief history of Jabber, and its authors, etc. Read on" One thing's for sure -- AOL hasn't made any friends by periodically kicking off all non-official clients from AIM, and companies would like to know that won't happen to them with a custom client.
This story links to jabber.com (which is fine) but if you're looking for the open source project you might want to hit jabber.org. The open source project is where it all started, and jabber.com is just one of the many commercial efforts working to help jabber be a better tool for the business world and enterprises.
We're still a young project and have many hurdles to leap yet, so if you bump into anything you'd like to see improved with jabber, it's open source and we welcome any/all assistance :)
Check out:
There are others, but these are the 2 best I've found. I seem to prefer licq, but that's a personal preference. YMMV.
It's been almost a decade since the last holdouts (Prodigy, MSN, AOL, etc... remember when they weren't just expensive ISPs?) figured out that making email for the entire world dependent on a single server farm might be a bad idea... or at least, at the time I'd assumed that they had figured it out. Now I realize that they were forced to accept internet email standards because no single one of them controlled a majority of the market, and each of them dreams of catching the next big technology and entrapping it on their own LAN. My email address is roystgnr@rice.edu; why should my instant messaging address be in a flat namespace (AIM, pre-internet AOL email), or god forbid even a flat numerical namespace (ICQ, pre-internet compuserve email)!?
Does managing a technical company kill your long term memory?
Fine, Jabber has a faint outside chance of becoming a standard protocol for private instant-messaging systems, and might eventually compete well with things like Lotus Sametime and Microsoft's conferencing server.
Granted, this isn't all that likely since both Microsoft and Lotus can already integrate their instant messaging well with H.323 videoconferencing and with T.120 application-sharing and whiteboarding tools, and seamlessly tie in to directory services (not just for authentication) in ways that also make it fairly simple to link companies' and organizations' realtime messaging/collaboration together without relaying each other's messages. Fact is, Jabber is a good 2 or 3 years behind its competitors in the intranet space in terms of features. They're even miles behind the ICQ Groupware server.
As far as public instant-messaging goes, it wouldn't be fair to say Jabber has no chance of catching on. But those chances are slim. Let's say that for some reason it does. Who is going to run and pay for the giant Jabber servers sitting in the middle of everything? An instant messaging system that can support millions of concurrent users will not run on a single donated 4-processor box running Postgres or MySQL. It won't run on two. It's going to take a server farm or two with millions of dollars in hardware, millions of dollars in commercial database licenses, and millions of dollars in engineers' salaries to tend to it. Please remember that while the messaging itself is peer to peer, the login and buddy-status monitoring services are not.
How, exactly, is this going to be paid for if the clients are open-sourced, access to the servers is unrestricted, and advertising can be blocked? A tip jar?
(For those confused, JabberIM is the Jabber client available from Jabber.com. It is one of many Jabber clients available.)
:) Check this out:
Most of your complaints can be fixed in the Preferences dialog.
>* Concurrent connection: If I open two JabberIM
>on different machines, they will battle for the
>control of the connection!
To differentiate between connections, the clients need to have different "resources." You probably didn't set one of your instances to have a different resource, so they are trying to fight over the same resource ("JabberIM" by default). Jabber will happily let you use as many connections as you want at once.. as long as each client has unique resources.
>* Or the messages pop and hide my work, or I
>never see them... I can't wait a few seconds
>before reading the mail like I was used to on ICQ
>and MSN.
>* If a new user send me a message while I write
>to the other, the new window will capture my
>keystroke. Very annoying when you say : "I love
>you!".
Both of these can be fixed with a quick trip to your Preferences. Simply tell it to not gain focus for new messages.
Now, I'm a full convert on the usefulness of Linux. I've got it running on two different platforms in my house right now. But, calling it an industry standard is probably taking that a bit too far.
It may become a defacto standard one day, but in my opinion we're still quite a way off (and Linux has a lot of growing up to do) before we reach that point.
{{donning fire-retardant clothing}}
--Mid
- - mail transfer agent (MTA);
- - mail delivery agent (MDA); and
- - mail user agent (MUA).
Because the three components are somehwat independent and substitutable (e.g. sendmail/qmail, pine/elm/eudora) different palyers can upgrade without breaking some critical day-to-day use. Looking at the Jabber, it tries to be the polygot of IMs which while laudable, does make it a little unwieldly to offer alternatives and competition in the form of low barriers to entry tis'good (TM). For example, stuff like Elvin which is content-based messaging looks intriguing.Perhaps some thought should be given to aligning the components in an analogous fashion. Has someone looked into comparison of the key attributes of the different IM system to see whether a similar structure could be nominated? For example, I would hazard
In fact spliting channels into a separate session control and others is what is suggested by BXXP framework.
LL
man, do they have templates for trolls these days?
It's a real struggle getting a server compiled and running with even the most basic of functionality, and many of the most interesting value-added features have little or no documentation.
There is an active development community on the JDEV mailing list and 'jdev@conference.jabber.org' channel, but like so many other open source projects out there, 90% of the developers are busy writing cool features, with really only Peter Saint-Andre (aka 'stpeter') putting any real effort into documentation.
A lesser problem is what some call 'fascination with the technology', and is a cause of the lack of users- most Jabber users are developers and admins who are more interested in playing with the new technology for it's own sake than as a way to communicate. Basically, 180 degrees from the motivation of the average AIM user.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
There are already several Jabber-related projects only tangentially related to instant messaging, and there are many other interesting applications for XML routing on the horizon.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I don't understand why Microsoft doesn't just build an Instant Messanger into their OS's like they did with IE and make that the standard by brute force. Conceivably Microsoft could agree to an IM truce with AOL and have their Windows/MSN IM work with AOL and ICQ. Then that would be the standard. The Bush administration wouldn't go after such an action on anti-trust grounds and that is the only possible deterant I can come up with. Dominance of IM also further isolates non-Microsoft OS's.
IM compatibility is nice, and necessary, but isn't the secret to Jabber.
Jabber needs real clients (i.e. Win32 and Mac) that don't suck, and people are comfortable with. It needs the power of ICQ with the simplicity of AIM. It also needs moron proof servers.
This is the key point. The majority of computers are still in the corporate sector. We all use ICQ and AIM for communication, and nobody is happy about it. Some companies have tried to block AIM as a security risk (you can send corporate information out without any log of it), but found that it became key to the company's communication.
A real system where I could communicate externally but have a special internal system would be helpful.
Now, the real solution, IMO, is a Open Source/Corporate combo. In that scenario, there is a freely available public product that is really good. However, there should be a commercial (but inexpensive, IT budgets have gotten tighter) product that works with an internal server that is easy to install. Additionally, include an Admin kit so companies can configure what is allowed.
For example, if I could only allow people to send URLs and text externally, but files internally, that would be a useful collaborative tool. That let's them communicate/goof off/whatever, while not exposing my company except internally. This would also take the load off my e-mail servers.
Additionally, the corporate version should allow the corporate server to communicate on behalf of the clients. That way, I can block ICQ/AIM at my firewall, but allow the corporately supported client through.
Do that, and Jabber takes a REAL foothold. Make the corporate version license access to AIM/ICQ servers (cobranded perhaps) so there isn't a risk of it breaking.
Corporate America is NOT happy with AIM/ICQ. ICQ Groupware dying was a shame. There needs to be a real solution, and there is money to be made in this space. AOL with it's FCC agreement would likely jump at this, they could get revenue to cover costs. The Open Source community gets Jabber to NOT be harassed, and corporate America gets a real communicative tool.
Alex
Burris
For me the real killer is not having a client that will tunnel through the strict http firewall
You may want to try this Jabber applet for the Java platform unless your strict http firewall actually parses the incoming data and does not allow binary Java applets to cross the wire.
Will I retire or break 10K?
See http://www.jabber.com/news/release_102400.shtml for a press release from last fall disclosing the partnership between Jabber and VA Linux, Slashdot's corporate parent.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
For those of you rushing out to get Jabber as an AIM replacement (like I did) better settle down. AOL has started blocking all jabber.com IP adresses from using their servers. So no more interoperability with AIM.
Jabber still works with ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN messangers, just not AIM. Maybe someday AOL and Jabber can come up with an agreement. But as it is, things are at a stalemate.
Stupid like a fox!
The interface is simple, it's easy to use. But there is some problems:
Frequent disconnection
Concurrent connection: If I open two JabberIM on different machines, they will battle for the control of the connection!
MSN stay connected when I close JabberIM. Very annoying, friends talk to a wall during hours.
Or the messages pop and hide my work, or I never see them... I can't wait a few seconds before reading the mail like I was used to on ICQ and MSN.
If a new user send me a message while I write to the other, the new window will capture my keystroke. Very annoying when you say : "I love you!".
If those isues would be resolved, JabberIM would perfect for my needs.
Jabber.org and Jabber.com (and any other parties would be most certainly welcome) are working together to establish a Jabber Foundation along the lines of the Apache and Gnome Foundations to assist in addressing many of the issues surrounding Jabber being raised here. We've just completed a survey to help us gather some suggestions for addressing these issues and have gotten some great results. One of the many initiatives we're undertaking, in addition to improved documentation, enhanced client development, and extended user involvement, is formal support for the ongoing IMPP work, in particular CPIM, SIP and BEEP. If you'd like more information, email me or info@jabber.org. Peace!
10 January 1610