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Jabber Gathers Steam In Australia
Jeremy Lunn writes "Jabber is on a rolling start in Australia with this article featured in The Age in Melbourne (and the Sydney Morning Herald) 'Jabbering classes push for more power' and the formation of Jabber Australia."
Jabbering classes push for more power
By Nathan Cochrane
June 10 2003
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A small band of Australian advocates of open source has joined a growing worldwide army trying to wrest the power of instant messaging away from Titans such as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, handing it back to individuals and the enterprise.
Imagine if you were to send an email but it bounced back because the recipient lacked the software to understand your message. Or if you tried to make a phone call, but were told by a canned voice that your phone number was not recognised. That is the state of instant messaging (IM) today.
A user must install several IM clients - software chat programs - on their PC to communicate with others, and online chats often cannot be easily carried between services. Although some clients understand a variety of IM systems, they are not widely used and are liable to breaking at the whim of the entrenched proprietary IM providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft.
Dubbed "the Linux of IM", Jabber is an XML protocol devised in 1998 that transfers messages in real time across the internet. Its open-source, open-standard architecture readily allows individuals and organisations to create their own services on servers they own.
A side effect is greatly enhanced security and robustness of communications because messages are not sent in the clear to servers on the other side of the world over the insecure internet.
Jabber clients - software programs such as RhymBox that exploit the underlying Jabber architecture - also work with proprietary standards, providing the best of both worlds and unplugging the IM bottleneck.
Jabber's heavyweight backers include Intel, H-P, Sony, IBM and Hitachi, and telcos including BellSouth in the US and Orange. It is being formalised as XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol), an internet standard, by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Despite such impressive achievements, the adoption of Jabber in Australia has been slow, which is the reason an advocacy and technology steering group, Jabber Australia, was formed in Melbourne this week, says its founding president, Jeremy Lunn.
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server, but there are far fewer users here and so far only 20 people have responded to the request for help on Jabber Australia's jabber.org.au website, Lunn says.
But the local chapter has high-level support from the Jabber Software Foundation in the US that pioneers the protocol. On its board is Melbourne-based Robert Norris, a Jabber Software Foundation council member and lead developer of the open-source JabberD 2 server.
"The key advantage in Jabber remains in the openness," says Lunn. "Jabber doesn't tie consumers to any one program or service provider. Consumers will now have a choice."
Lunn sees Microsoft's and AOL's decision last week to sign a $US750 million peace treaty, making their rival systems compatible or "interoperable", as a "half-baked" yet positive step towards knitting together the IM archipelago.
"It still doesn't allow people to run their own servers, such as in Australia, whether they be individuals, ISPs or businesses," he says.
However, it will make things much easier for users of Jabber because less code needs to be maintained for Jabber to interoperate with other networks, Lunn says. "When these systems do open up to the public, providing they use an open standard as the protocol, it's good for Jabber and all IM users, regardless of whether it's SIMPLE (session initiation protocol for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions protocol) or the Jabber protocol."
Jabber faces competition from SIMPLE, also wending its way through the Internet Engineering Task Force a few steps behind, which has the support of IBM and Microsoft. But critics such as Lunn say SIMPLE is as simple does - it lacks the functionality and purpose of XMPP/Jabber.
"Although SIMPLE has some great advantages in compa
Here is some info for those of you who would like to know more about Jabber and how it's doing in AU.
/ 13 152
r ou ps.htm
http://www.jabber.org.au/
http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid
http://www1.hurgh.org:81/
http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_G
I'm not sure a lot of people got your reference to SIP/SIMPLE .. so .. sorry for pointing out the obvious.
it's in my head
Moreover, Psi (psi.sourceforge.net) is a perfectly usable (just like ICQ) and cross-platform client. If GNOME is your style, there's Gabber.
So, what's the real problem?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
This problem was solved ages ago by Trillian, but AOL are always trying to kill it off. Isn't Jabber just *another* IM standard?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Mate, come to Australia (well to Sydney anyway) and that attitude will get you everywhere. We even have an annual festival for it.
Is there a system setup for connecting all the local, public jabber servers together to create a world network. Ie if I had the resources and wanted to could I create a server that allows people to connect to me and also talk to a host of international people as well?
As nice as it is been able to talk to people in my country only (Australia) is it as simple as ICQ in talking to people all over the globe?
I know not everyone would want to join such a system however this is what is required to really become popular with the *average* user, ie not anyone reading slashdot.
37 - what does it stand for really...
i've been using miranda for a while now.
it allows for protocol plugins so that you can use it with different IM networks. Check the site, people have been making tons. they get pretty whacky too, i know game server plugins exist. maybe a jabber plugin too. it puts it all into one nice clean little client unless you want it ugly and bloated and trillianish.
miranda itself doesn't give you a server to IM everybody on but the way it's designed it should be simple to modify it so that it does. this is the biggest difference between miranda and jabber.
miranda is open source, but the program is buggy (maybe only for me, maybe because i'm using windows client). so hurrah for them.
While it sounds like a great idea, I'm sceptical as to whether it will actually become widely used.
The big players have already claimed a significant section of the market. And the IM market is subject to the first mover effect (first in gets the biggest share) and the network effect (you need people to get people). It doesn't matter how good the protocol is, if there are only 10 other people you can talk to with it, it is not of much use.
Not to meantion that Microsoft's Messenger (*shudder*), comes stock standard with Windows XP, and is a "built in feature", just like the DOJ thing with IE. I wasn't able to purge it from my system, through any control panel, but had to locate the directory and remove it the old fashioned way. Sadly I think this is far beyond the skills of your average GUI-domesticated user, so people will just end up using it.
If you could get the major IM clients to conform to the protcol everything would be fine and dandy, but good luck with that....
Jabber is a great protocol and it has a lot of flexibility in it and will expand into who know what in the future. It is also quite popular here and it became my main IM protocol a few months ago. I use Miranda IM with Jabber plugin and it works perfectly stable. In Linux I use Gabber and it laso works just fine. I have a Jabber server runing on my home LAN and so we can easily chat even if the internet connection is down.
Thanks to all working on Jabber and clients for bringing us this great piece of code!
Live long and propser!
We recently deployed Jabber as our company IM protocol (yay, more waste of time). Unfortunately, our computers are somewhat backwards and the de facto standard has been Windows 95 (Yeah I know, I know) with a sprinkling of XP. The client that runs on the XP Machine is very, very nice. This client unfortunately doesn't run on 95. So we have a very substandard substitute for most of our workers. (BTW, If anyone knows of a good looking Jabber Client that runs on 95, I would be very grateful). Anyways, apart from client issues. The best bit about Jabber is that you can set up your own server, independent of ones run by the producers of the product (ala Yahoo or ICQ). So it is very good in a business setting where you want everyone to keep in touch without clogging email or wasting phone time.
The problem is that the average Joe doesn't seen openness as an advantage. If it doesn't allow him/her to chat to Rita, Bob and Sue on MSN and/or ICQ, then he's not going to change.
Openness is great and good and is a worthwhile goal, but unfortunately you have to tell Joe that in order to get the full advantages that Jabber has to offer he's going to have to change his client AND get his friends to change (and they'll not want to change unless their friends are going to change too).
Unfortunately for a lot of people - that sounds like too much hard work and they'll stick to MSN or ICQ.
Side note: Most of my friends use MSN these days having initally been initially on ICQ (we're talking 5-7 digit UID's) and they're not all techies. Some far from it.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The best Jabber client (IMHO) is PSI.. http://psi.affinix.com
It works for Windows, Linux & Mac OS X, and uses QT.
It's under very active development, although there has not been a release for a while.
Version 0.9test1 has full support for encrypted messaging. On a system with GnuPG installed and setup it works pretty much out of the box. There is no automatic exchange of keys though, you can use something like GPG Agent to do that for you.
As to working over port 80, you can always setup a server yourself with port 80 open. But if you meant working over an http proxy, I don't think so.
Hope that helps... Happy Jabbering! =)
Jabber Australia was incorporated several days ago, and has half a dozen young enthusiasts on the committee. The article in The Age probably ran a little early, because we don't currently have any services to offer the public...yet. We are in the process of putting together our website/forums/server/services, and it should all be up and running within a week or so.
:)
Our current website is very basic, but it's standing up to the Slashdot Effect so far.
- Tony (Jabber Australia Committee)
IRC servers can only connect between specific servers -- think of it like a tree. If you knock off a 'hub' server -- a branch -- then all the leaves off that hub are gone.
Jabber, however, is more like e-mail. Any Jabber server can talk to any other Jabber server. Which, yes, like with e-mail means one specific Jabber server might be down, but like e-mail, it means the entire network doesn't fold.
--Rachel
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server
The server mentioned is run by tlen.pl, Poland's fastest growing communicator. Tlen has taken a big chunk out of both gadu-gadu and icq, both with notoriously poorly written clients and technical problems on the server-side. Tlen's approach has been similar to MSN's - along with a IM account you automatically get an email acct, which you can check in the communicator itself. It's actually a pretty nice package, if you can ignore the banner ads and the fact that they're up to version 4 and *you still can't search the archive*.
Ironically, I find Jabber a much more simple/straightforward protocol than SIP/SIMPLE. Especially as Jabber in its present form can be used as a full-featured instant messaging packages, where SIMPLE is not far enough along, and the only SIMPLE implementations therefore rely on proprietary extensions to flesh it out.
/is/ here right now, and easy to implement, and functional today, and despite some of its own rough edges it's always felt a lot simpler to work with than SIMPLE. XML's pretty darn easy to parse. :)
This isn't a troll; I do honestly think SIP and SIMPLE have their place. SIP is way more suited to negotiating multimedia streams than XMPP/Jabber ever will be. SIMPLE strikes me as much better for handling 'conference call' type situations without relying on Jabber's groupchat implementation, as well.
But SIMPLE just ain't here yet...it's a promising base for a lot of things, and the pledge of various instant messaging networks to support it is great...but it's still under construction. Jabber
--Rachel
Jabber is more than "just" an instant messaging thing - it's a simple bidirectional socket-based generic DTD-less XML protocol that is computer-language agnostic. Unlike the request/response model of HTTP, Jabber messages are asynchronous (unsolicited messages allowed in both directions) and share a single socket connection until the session is complete. In each direction on the socket you have a single-rooted XML document. Each Jabber message is basically a sub-node of this document as parsed by your favorite SAX-style parser firing a callback when the message is received. There are some manditory tags for joining groups, broadcasting and requesting info among other things. For the most part you just support the message types that you care about and you can add your own application-specific messages with custom XML payloads. If a Jabber client or server is not familiar with a message type it is ignored. Nice. Simple. Effective.
I think the e-mail metaphor is a very nice one when explaining what jabber is to newbies.
Unlike most other IMs, where there is only one server (no more than one adress for accessing the server(s)) the Jabber network is built up by lots of servers communicating with each other, like e-mail.
Your jabber address looks and works a lot like your e-mail addresse. User@jabber.org or User@mail.com, same functionality, different protocols. A pretty obvious and shallow observation, but is very useful when explaining for newbs.
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The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
Let me list some of its main advantage:
The analogy with current email system is hard to miss. Think how bad it would be if you are forced to use joe@hotmail.com and joe@aol.com as the only way to exchange emails. Even worse, you have to log into joe@aol.com if you want to send email to bob@aol.com, and then having to log into joe@hotmail.com to send an email to alice@hotmail.com. Not to mention that having to use the name joe2001@icq.com because joe@icq.com is already taken by somebody else.
Shameless plug: please try our jabber client at
www.akeni.com. It is runs natively on both Windows and Linux. It has some nice features such as tabbed chat window.
But don't believe them. Since you are reading Slashdot you can handle reading the real specs. XMPP is very reasonable and SIP is nuts. Just trying reading the spec.
It seems Microsoft has backed SIP/SIMPLE. This is probably a political move. They cannot back XMPP since that's their "enemy". Of course, they'd prefer it if every just used MSN. What a horrible world that would be. In fact SIP/SIMPLE is so bad and far away from implementation that its good for them. And delay towards standardization is good for the company that owns the desktop and installs their IM client there.
I could never imagine using MSN -- every thing you type going thru a server in Redmond! They'd also monitor when you took a coffee break.
At our institution we have deployed jabber quite successfully. Our implementation is quite open, but for you it sounds like a little more lockdown is in order. The main things that I can think of to help your jabber buisness case are:
This really is not that huge of a list, but creating a security model that satisfies management, users and sysadmins is rarely easy. If your users truly want/need an IM to use, jabber is the way to go. What other system gives you the ability to make all of the above choices yourself?
Good luck in your endeavours!