Slashdot Mirror
Jabber Could Get An IETF Working Group
21mhz writes: "There is a story on CNET news that provides an analysis of what is happening with
SIP/SIMPLE, AOL protocols and Jabber/XMPP in the IETF. It says that Jabber is close to securing a dedicated IETF working group, in spite of political struggle and corporate maneuvering."
For those of you who want to try out jabber, psi is a great crossplatform client, with support for windows, linux and mac OSX. I've been using it for some time, and with the msn, icq/aim, etc transports, there isn't really any reason to use anything else.
I really do hope the jabber folks are able to make jabber a standard.
The jabber.org and jabber.com servers have been up for years (not talking about uptime!) with no likelihood that they will ever go away. And those are simply the two most prominent public servers.
I've used Jabber on and off from the beginning and I can safely agree that the user end is a bit rough.
...).
However, here are the reasons you want it:
XML: Now I'm sure by the time this is posted, there will be tons of "XML is the future, adopt it and DESPAIR" posts, but in this case, it is a clear benefit. Bascially, due to XML, the message format allows trivial extension of the protocol. Really, you can just make up an XML element, stick it in the right place and *poof*.
"Is it really this trivial?", you ask. Well, one of my pet projects was writing a Jabber bot for pen/paper RPGs (think Dungeons and Dragons). It took about six hours and I added a element (use the sides property to specify type of dice) that would message you back with a dice roll. I never completely finished the client, but it worked.
Keep in mind all I did to do this was hack two copies of the command-line client--no server changes whatsoever. The key here is that any Jabber server will pass custom XML--so protocol content changes *DO NOT* require server changes and are completely client implementable. Freedom for the masses, anyone?
The possibility of custom clients is huge. Unfortunately, the ability for large companies (AOL, MSFT) to control the state-of-the-art and to make sure that, despite interacting with all IM clients, theirs offers better proprietary functionality on their network (i.e. everyone can message, but AOL partnered with newgame.com so only AOL users can use IM to launch NewGame netgames).
Transparency: This is a big win. It is always possible to pull apart the protocol. Heck, the protocol is designed to be human-readable. This has the added benefit of making obfuscation really obvious (why is AOL using elements named option1, option2, and option3? What is the nsakey element for?
OpenSource: You read Slashdot, you know the pros and cons. The less obvious side of this is how it compares to the corporate offerings--specifically SIP. SIP is great, but try to find a free implementation. If you're using SIP for VoIP (which is pretty much the norm) you probably have had to drop a chunk of change on a nasty Cisco CallManager server.
Loosely Connected: Perhaps the most intelligent Jabber decision was to make it just like e-mail. There's no longer a global hostname, but rather a user@host naming scheme. If you're Internet savvy you can get your e-mail address and jabber address to be the same (exercise left to the reader, think about it).
Existing Gateways: Jabber's weirdest appeal is that it already has gateways to access existing services. The docs have the specifics, but the gateways servers can hit AOL and about everybody else.
Good Standards: Practically all of the corporate offerings are standards that were thrown together (Mirabilis ICQ grew like a Frankenstein's monster, see the procotol specs, they're scary http://www.d.kth.se/~d95-mih/icq/). A ground-up thoughtful implementation like Jabber is a Good Thing(TM) compared to some of the messes.
There are other reasons but I'm tired of typing. You get the idea--Jabber stays crunchy in milk. It's nummy. Get some.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)