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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."
Here is some info for those of you who would like to know more about Jabber and how it's doing in AU.
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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'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.
Yes, server to server connections are a normal thing in Jabber. In fact, a jabber userID (the JID which identifies a user or a service on a server) resembles an e-mail address - it has a form of: user@domain.
For example I've created a simple HOWTO on setting up server to server connections with Jabberd 1.4.2 on OpenBSD, you can read it here.
Moreover, Jabber protocol uses UTF-8 encoding for all communication and config files, so there are no problems with different character encodings - you don't have to mess with anything to write messages with polish diacritical characters, chinese, cyrillic or arabic!
Actually, the Jabber protocol is gaining quite a big popularity here in Poland as more people are getting tired with local proprietary IM system called GaduGadu which provides the official client only for windows (although multiple unofficial have been created for Linux and BSD).
There's also a central web site for Jabber in Poland, and already there are multiple public servers like chrome.pl or jabber.atman.pl.
The largest polish web portal, Wirtualna Polska has even provided its own public Jabber server and has developed official client that supports voice and video chat through Jabber!
It's good to see Australia go in the same direction!
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
No. This 'problem' is not what we've solved with Trillian. The problem we aim to solve with Trillian is 'god, we need a way to have multiple IM and information clients in a single executable, because this is insane.' The problem Jabber aims to solve is 'my god, instant messaging is important to many things, we need an open standard so people can write software and set up servers as they need, without being hooked into proprietary stuff.'
:)
I'm one of the Trillian developers; trust me on this.
Jabber picks up multiple network support on server-side as a benefit of the modular design of the server and extensible nature of the protocol. HOWEVER. The Jabber development community will tell you that the transports are not intended as an all-in-one solution; they're just there to ease the transition to Jabber, so you don't have to lose touch with existing contacts while you're urging them over to Jabber as well. The transports are, in fact, the bane of many a Jabber dev who finds people think of Jabber as a Trillian equivalent -- i.e., looking at it as a way to get onto the legacy networks and not looking at the Jabber protocol and Jabber contacts themselves.
And yes, as noted, Trillian gets Jabber in our next release.
--Rachel
Uh. Worst competition?
:)
No, we just didn't include Jabber earlier because AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo are a bitch to write for, and the time and energy needed to go into getting those right first. It's called prioritization of limited manpower (or, in my case, womanpower).
The Jabber portion's working in the internal alpha builds, and the next version of Trillian does have Jabber support. While I'm not as active in the Jabber dev community at the moment since we're hunkered down debugging and cleaning up to get the next release out, we're pretty devoted to the Jabber community as well. I've been an active participant in standards discussions and revising and authoring JEPs, and we have some long-term plans for Trillian regarding Jabber which are pretty beneficial to both Trillian and Jabber.
--Rachel
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
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.