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IETF Approves XMPP Core as Proposed Standard
hystrix writes "As long expected, the IESG has approved the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core (draft-ietf-xmpp-core-22.txt) as a Proposed Standard. For those of you in the dark, thats the protocol behind the only tried and proven open IM platform, Jabber. Congrats to the hard working Peter Saint-Andre, and the entire XMPP Working Group."
...to send Cougaar society status messages around - we've been able to get around 1100 messages (albeit simple ones) per second.
We're using the Ruby wrapper Jabber4R as well as various GUI clients, and we're using the Jabber 1.4.2 server.
The Army reading list
No standard for media streaming (video, audio, file transfer).
What about secure features? This can lock you in also.
Its good to get some sort of standard but it does not go far enough. Too little too late.
This is just further proof that the OS community can right good, solid, secure code. Pooring lots of money at a problem just makes prices higher, and a few high level management people richer. It's just adding overhead to the problem. OS can right good solid secure code. If only Microsoft could....
I think this is a good thing, but it all depends on who implements it.. If all the major IM "brands" continue to use their own standard, then whats the point?... If they were inter-operable, then there would need to be other key selling points (what?.. selling points for free IM??) bah.. early morning spout-offs
This is nice... At last we have a standard IM protocol.
However, unless the major player in IM implements the protocol, this standard importance is not very high.
That would change if someone develop a killer app that make use of the protocol, but for IM the way it's done now, we need at least one of the major player to implement the protocol... At that is not likely in a near future.
since e-mail & IM are going to blurr over each other in the future, how about extending this standard to a free, open mailbox standard for email clients? Aren't we *all* sick of every email program using a different, incompatible mailbox format? I still use Netscape 4 for my email because I can't move my mailbox archive over to any newer application that is decent to use.
this is better than IRC, it's standard is still marked experimental :)
don't forget to patent that before Microsoft does.
Good stuff
So how to integrate. Continue working with Jabber libraries, or will these be obviated with XMPP API's and libraries?
Oh, and now that we have a standard, how will this standard hold up againt various patent issues and claims?
--- have you healed your church website?
Just because it's going to be a standard, that doesn't mean it'll become THE standard. IM, etc. would need to adopt it.
Anyway, I'm still wainting for Linksys to make a home router/hub for RFC1149 (IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers)
--
Fortunately Proposed Standard doesn't actually mean that much. As an FYI MIME (multipurpose Internet Mail extenstions) is still a draft standard even though it is widely implemented.
Likewise both S/MIME and OpenPGP have progressed. Eventually sanity will prevail and SIPPING will be "blessed".
by the world's highschool girls. Jabber will now be synonomous with "Instant Messaging" in American highschools.
That was like a stampede!!
clifgriffin > blog
Extensible. Now there's a verb Microsoft loves. They'll extensible this to death now that everyone else thinks it's a standard.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In the end, we'll still end up with companies (e.g. Microsoft and AOL) who will still continue with their closed/proprietary formats; if they do adopt an open standard, they will try to make it different so it ends up being incompatible, or patent it so no one else can use it. And lets not even get into the ills of what Microsoft did for HTML Scripting... eck.
So, yay, we have a standard. But can we get everyone to implement it PROPERLY?
I'm off to swap some illegally acquired content on XMPPster.
Er, how do you pronounce that again?
These sigs are more interesting tha
Is that all it takes?
I'll have you know my standards commity just declaired me King of the World. Now to prove you fealty, I demand you send me your women!
At best an Heir has been annointed now he must claim the throne and keep it. As with most things it's much easier said than done.
a very simple design - uses just a subset of XML (no comments, macros, DTDs)
good error recovery
good service discovery
not tied to any vendor or language
not domain specific
bidirectional asynchronous communication - an XMPP session is just a pair of XML documents (one going in each direction).
decent speed
I see XMPP being as big as HTTP in the future. It will be the standard for interactive distributed communications.
"For those of you in the dark, thats the protocol behind the only tried and proven open IM platform, Jabber. "
Eh... for those in the dark... what exactly is IETF and/or IESG ???
IETF, XMPP, MSNBC, GBA, CNN, FUD, IEEE. Why'd they even both making keyboards with lowercase letters? We should just speak in acronyms.
Jabber didn't make it and won't make it for a long time, if ever. There are still problems and lack of voice and video chat (they are not even a part of the standard). Voice/Video can be handled by numerous other standards ... but the problem is that there are too many of them and neither is OSS. It may have a niche in small/medium private chat networks. Its price is right, but it lacks a lot of conveniences other IM protocols have to offer.
The most important factor is that IM standard/service only matter (in the larger picture) if enough people use it. I don't have a single friend or aquantance who use Jabber, most use either MSN, AIM/ICQ or Yahoo. AIM/ICQ, perhaps, has the best chance of becoming a "standard" ... although I hate both. MSN ... is MSN ... enough said. Yahoo is the most balanced IMHO.
XML is:
A) More bloated than a binary format
B) Harder to parse & hence less efficient that a binary format
C) Much easier to casually snoop on
Face it , XML is flavour of the month and trendy , it has zero advantages over formats.
Shouldn't the IE Task Force worry about making IE work instead of all these whiz bang new features? Hey guys... security first!!
This is great news. People need to list as a requirement for clients and servers XMPP compliance.
Everyone who uses iChat, stop what you are doing and go fill out a bug request form on Apple's developer site (http://developer.apple.com).
I'm going to go fill my request right now.
While you're at it, maybe you should request that they open a protocol plugin api to developers.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
the first IETF IM standard to make it through the process was the CPIM package (draft-ietf-impp-cpim-msgfmt). It's a specification on how to interconnect IM systems rather than a complete IM protocol specification.
The other major player in IETF standards-space is SIMPLE - the presence specification documents for that (draft-ietf-simple-presence) are in the RFC Editor's queue.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them.....
A Slashdot article that doesn't assume that I know what in the fuck your silly little obscure protocol/project/whatever is!
Yes, jabber is the nads. Its how instant messaging should be done.
Congrats
With it's commanding presence in IM over everyone else, it looks to me like AIM is the standard.
How will servers for this IM protocol recoup their expenses? Or will they provided competitive reliability at no cost?
SIP is already an IETF standard, and SIMPLE has an IETF working group in order to make it one.
XMPP is a different and competing protocol that has also now been standardized. We have two different and competing protocols, both standardized by the same body. To me it is a case of chickens running around with their heads cut off.
As far as support, MS, IBM, Sun, and most telecoms favour SIP with SIMPLE for IM. I've no idea what the other entrenched IM players, AOL and Yahoo, want.
Random acronym one disaproves random acronym two.
Am I the only one who thinks acronym use in technology has gone too far?
WTF? LOL.
Unless you have a very dextrous tongue, IETF, XMPP, MSNBC, GBA, CNN, and IEEE are not acronyms.
Even with XMPP I don't think, in the short term, you'll be able to get away with only one IM account (such as AIM) and be able to talk to your buddy on Yahoo!. But as software like Gaim and Trillian move toward XMPP and people use Gaim and Trillian more and more, the independant services AIM, Yahoo! MSN, ICQ, will have to move to XMPP or risk being left in the dust (because once people are using XMPP and Gaim/Trillian, they don't really need AIM or Yahoo! servers to communicate.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
This idea is certainly not new and has been mentioned on Slashdot many times: one bit of XML bloat that is 100% unnecessary is the need to name the closing tag.
For example:
<tag_name>Foo</tag_name>
Is needlessly redundant.
Too bad the XML spec is not changed to make the closing tag name optional similar to Lisp s-expressions:
<tag_name>Foo</>
since it is implicit anyway in a single rooted tree of nodes (as all XML documents are).
This would reduce XML overhead by about 20%.
Hopefully the XML standards people are considering this for a future revision - but I doubt it.
Few months ago, I tried to run jabber in the company where I work, because we have offices in different parts of Europe and the communication is sometimes too slow. The interesting feature of jabber is that one can run his own server, so that the secret communication doesn't go anywhere outside a firm like with ICQ. We have linux RH7.3 and (mostly) Win2000 desktops, so I installed gabber resp. exodus. But all the jabber software turned out to be quite unuseable. Exodus was very unstable. Gabber didn't want to dock on my gnome panel. To configure the jabberd was also quite a pain. Actually, after my experience with IRC and ICQ I find a panel applet to be the most important part of the IM. If one finds a message always 2 hours after arriwal, it has no point to use IM :( ICQ is quite a good in this respect.
I got to the point that we exchanged two messages with a coleague in the same office. Then I decided that it is not worth of the effort. Neither the windows nor the linux client are mature enough to be convenient to use. Well, in my job, I can play half a day with something like that, but not much more ;)
But maybe somebody has a different experience. Is there somebody who really uses jabber in real word for a real communication with real people? With at least basic functionality (= arrival of a message makes a change on panel) in both linux and windows?
Probably not. They explicitly removed it from SGML when they created XML.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
...because less than a decade later the same folks (AOL and MSN, for two) who had the lesson smashed in their face in the mid 90's are trying to stick with the exact same mistake.
Back then, there were fiefdoms of online access and email, all kind of piddling along. They began getting a clue, first with email bridges to the Internet, and saw their business start to take off. They then got into the business of making their bridges better, and so did their business. Eventually they quit being Online Service Providers and became Internet Access Providers.
In the mainstream press, it was eventually stated that people wanted to go online to communicate with each other. Services that helped that, thrived. Services that hindered, withered.
What is IM but communication?
But IM providers are still in this stupid gatekeeper role. Perhaps one of the WORST things that Microsoft has done is to teach us all that the most successful business model is to become a gatekeeper or tax collector. IMHO a large part of the IM protocol mess is that businesses are paying more attention to the Microsoft model than to the Internet model.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's right. They are abbreviations, not acronyms.
SGML never supported optional closing tag names. It supported implicit optional closing tags (like <li> in HTML). There's a big difference.
Recall that we in the know (nerds) were using ICQ long before AOL or MSN ever realized what "IM" was. Thus, we dont need some "big player" to enter the market. If we adopt one, and somehow their is website adoption such as the several ICQ web tools, then XMPP will grow and the corporate greed will follow.
I love Jabber. Got all romantic about it when I read about Psi. So I gave it a try at home and it looks cool. But I need to use IM at work also, and I cannot get anything out of the standard Jabber port. Is there a publicly available proxy on port 80?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Doing so, with an embedded URL: $10
Fucking up the spelling of "Engineering" while forming your smarmy reply: $10
Failing to observe that the previous AC was making a joke: Priceless
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
SIP is something completely different, it grew out of VoIP-related technologies... it's the same type of thing, but it's not at all compatible, and it's not standardized (yet).
:evil grin:
XMPP has attracted some companies attention, while SIP has attracted other companies mindshare. There will be a split in enterprise messaging systems in the next few years.
I should form a company that sells gateways between the two...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
For those of you in the dark, thats the protocol behind the only tried and proven open IM platform, Jabber.
dang.....some day I'll finally arrive in the light. For now I suppose I'll just have to stay content with the small shack I built out of technical manuals. Well...thanks for the further enlightenment...it gives me something to think about on this desert island. ;)
OpenOffice.org's file format is XML. Multiple XML files and other binary files (graphics, etc.) are all stored into a Zip file. OOo files are typically much smaller than the same document in say, Word.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
haha
Can someone help me understand the differences between SIP & XMPP?
I see people post that 'finally we have an IM standard', but it seems that SIP is an existing standard; it's not targeted directly at instant messaging, but covers a lot of the functionality.
What about Jabber/XMPP support in Mozilla/Chatzilla?
OpenOffice.org's file format is XML. Multiple XML files and other binary files (graphics, etc.) are all stored into a Zip file. OOo files are typically much smaller than the same document in say, Word.
That's not saying much, Word saves two copies of the document in each file. Make the mistake of adding OLE support when creating a project in MSVC and you can get the same effect.
An XML file will not compress more than a well-designed binary format, it has more data in it. If space is critical, do not use XML.
But then space is not critical for IM...
If anyone (in the Denver, CO, area) is interested in hearing about Jabber and XMPP from St Peter himself, he'll be speaking about it at the next meeting of the Denver Java User's Group in a couple of weeks. Matt Miller will also talk a bit about the JSO (Jabber Streaming Objects) library for Java. See DJUG website (link above) for details.
;-)
It's free, including the food (if you get there before it's all gone
-- Alastair
Could someone tell me again how this is better than IRC?
This is great news. Maybe it will lead to more people to using Jabber. I'm very happy with Jabber IM. There are a lot of clients to pick from, several servers, and best of all most of them are free. Good implementations also.
His latest response was so interesting, I feel compelled to share it here:
XMPP is fascinating, and with a few (okay, quie a few) revisions could become
;) But none of these are
an all-encompassing standard. Going through the IETF and an open process was
absolutely the right way to make it happen and get the standard out.
Unfortunately, it may also be wholly irrelevant. AOL has won the IM battle, and
unlike the web, where unknown browsers may be connecting to arbitrary unknown
servers, with IM there are known clients (that AOL writes) going to known
servers (that AOL runs). AOL really has absolutely no compelling interest to
allow others to mess with this proven formula, and has case history of working
to prevent it. And most people really don't care - they just want to say "hi"
to their cousin however's easiest. Since that process is 1-to-1 instead of
many-to-many, there's not a compelling standardization argument. Now there
*are* non-official AOL clients. And wierd-ass proxies.
endorsed by or supported by AOL.
Other than the bastard merger between the AIM (TOC) and ICQ protocols to form
the hellspawn OSCAR, there's been basically no motion to make the other
protocols look like each other, unless you count the feature one-uppedness that
has characterized the recent push for audio and video chat and such features.
So it sure doesn't *feel* like a standards battle in the same way that both
Microsoft and Netscape were raping / redefining the HTML standard according to
their own whims in the mid-90's. It's more that there are four camps: AOL, with
the dominant mindshare; Microsoft, with the platform advantage; Yahoo, with the
newest features (and the cleanest protocol); and Jabber, with less than 0.1% of
the market, but pretty spiffy interop.
Ah, well. Endgame? Here's my prediction:
* AOL continues to leak dialup (bread+butter) users, still can't make money, TW
forced to disband AOL unit, is currently only really underperforming branch of
TW, with no light shining at the end of the tunnel.
* Microsoft's failed MSN service reignites the corporate mantra of "We'll do it
right the third time" - billg knows how to spot a good deal on the table, buys
AOL from TW, finally gets his MSN-AOL interop (everyone at AOL gets a
bobsmith42@aol.com Microsoft passport), and puts all of the ex-Netscape folks
on deathmarches with nice golden handcuffs to leave them too tired to work on
Mozilla. Mozilla development basically halts, since it's pretty much still the
Netscapers driving ongoing development. Billg gets to kill two birds (and maybe
more) with one stone - they are already acquiring AOL IP (e.g. Nullsoft)
anyhow, testing the waters. (A flood of Open Source-related / anti-MS startups
forms in the next few years from AOL+NS ex-employees, helping ignite the second
boom.)
* Yahoo continues to valiantly fight its solution out in the market, has a
brief edge over MS in features along with a surge of AOL members who actually
care the MS now owns the network. Billg cracks knuckles, puts 300 developers to
work on adding amazing new features, throws 2-3 full video games in for free,
makes MSN IM an integral part of in-game messaging systems, added to DirectPlay
standard (currently languishing) so all DirectX video games have easy in-game
messaging and collaboration tied to MSN.
* Yahoo capitulates as investors and shareholders cry to rally around the core
competency of search and rebuild Inktomi to be a worthy Google successor before
Yahoo's basically not worth anything. Non-core properties like IM dumped by the
wayside with no buyer. (Possible suprise acquisition of some of these
properties by Carlyle Group, Friendster, Google, or Wierd European Companies.)
* Jabber continues to lag a few generations behind in features, but maintains
hardcore grassroots audience of people wh
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
This idea is certainly not new and has been mentioned on Slashdot many times: one bit of XML bloat that is 100% unnecessary is the need to name the closing tag.
This is for clarity. IMHO, it's a Good Thing. If XML is too bloated for what you need it for, don't use it. This is a chat protocol for crying out loud.
If you'd look at the protocol, you'd see that the amount of XML actually transferred between two clients for a typical chat is rather minimal - I can't remember exactly what it was off the top of my head, but because it uses XML streams rather than XML documents, the amount of redundant crap is reduced a fair bit.
Anyway, back on the topic of your post - if you want unnamed closing tags, check out the HTML/XML predecessor, SGML.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
AIM, Yahoo! and MSN are here to stay, folks.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
I looked at this last week when I was deciding which message passing protocol to use for an application (I used BEEP), the protocol looks cool, but the only perl, ruby or python implimentations I've seen are *clients*
What about the other end?
Bugs Bunny was right.
We recently gave the Jabber Software Foundation the domain Xmpp.Org domain to use.
We are looking for other Open Source groups interested in using FREE domains.
Check it out over at Xmpp.Com
I just searched my IMPP email folder and noticed Jabber was mentioned as far back as 1999 and a link to the Jabber protocol description was posted in 2000. The question now is whether to laugh or cry.
Financial Services Firms (Banks) have been pushing the use of Interoperable Instant Messaging. A number of the bigger players have decided to use Jabber/XMPP as a messaging backbone to connect to multiple systems.
See the work that the Financial Instant Messaging Association (FIMA) is trying to do for pushing interoperability. Check the Membership list to see the list of players. Some of the members have Jabber/XMPP deployments that are over two years old. Others have proprietary systems like Lotus' Sametime and are looking to vendors like Jabber, Inc. and Antepo to help them connect to each other. Unlike other software vendors, Jabber, Inc, and Antepo are working with the community, Jabber Software Foundation to promote not just open software but open protocols, which is a giant step forward. There are many different types of language bindings that the community has built. The Jabber Extension Process, keeps things moving forward in a truely open forum.
Financial Consortiums that used to use proprietary IM systems are switching over to XMPP. Reuters Messaging, will connect to Jabber/XMPP servers as well as AIM and MSN. To get an idea of how serious this is. Reuters was the first to get a real commercial agreement to be able to use the AIM network without using the AIM client.
This is truly a great day for the "open" world.
We have already had an open IM, APEX. but nobody remember it...
Microsoft Messenger, the one that uses SIP/SIMPLE, is aimed at the enterprise market, with the key focus being secure, encrypted communications among a huge number of enterprises. The RTC SIP/SIMPLE server comes bundled with Windows 2003 Server (at least, as of SP1), and Windows Messenger comes with Windows XP. That means that anyone deploying a Microsoft network in their enterprise automatically has a ready-to-go instant messaging network that provides secure, logged, inter-company (if your admin allows it) communications. Not just IM, but full-fledged voice and video communications. Setting it up is as easy as adding a user to the domain.
And the cool part? The whole network is using SIP/SIMPLE, so you can write your own servers and clients to talk to it if you want to.
I was suggesting that the implementation of IM in SIP in RFC 3428 was not universally accepted as the way things are going to be. Note that it has not yet become an approved standard. Some people believe that piggybacking IM into SIP was not really a good idea. I have barely glanced at the arguments so I can't comment, I'm just parroting.
Since I've never used jabber, and only looked at SIP (but not for IM), I wouldn't pretend to be knowledgable about the availability of tools.
But I did want stress the differences between the two groups/protocol and their backers conflicting opinions.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON