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."

Comments

Standardized IM Format

[sabrex15]

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

Good but...

[javatips]

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.

Re:Good but...

[Graelin]

However, unless the major player in IM implements the protocol, this standard importance is not very high.

Actually, this isn't really true. ICQ/AOL, MSN and Yahoo all have a different protocol but products like Trillian can use Jabber as a generic protocol to layer on top of these proprietary protocols.

Not that I think it will happen, but with Jabber being a standard you'd think these smaller IM players could join together. Or at least link together.

We need more of this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Unimportant.

[CaptainCheese]

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)

Extensible

[Nom du Keyboard]

'Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core '

Extensible. Now there's a verb Microsoft loves. They'll extensible this to death now that everyone else thinks it's a standard.

Jabber protocol is excellent

[truth_revealed]

XMPP offers:

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.

No it isn't , it uses flavour-of-the-month XML

[Viol8]

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.

Re:No it isn't , it uses flavour-of-the-month XML

[NixLuver]

Isn't the art of good coding to make things as efficient as possible?

Perhaps, but you're using entirely the wrong criteria to determine efficiency. If our primary goal is creating proprietary data structures, then it might be more efficient to do it your way. If our primary goal is communication - i.e., broad usefulness of data structures in multiple application domains and types - XML is *far more efficient*. And at execution time, there's little penalty, because the XML data can be parsed into your C struct with little effort, and juggled entirely within that context until sucha time as you feel the need to send the data to hard drive or other application.

I said CASUAL snooping. If someone can just run tcpdump on a LAN they can read all the correspondance going on. If they have to figure out the protocol they'll probably not bother unless they have malicious intent.

ROFLMAO!!! You just don't get it, do you? The point the previous poster was making may have escaped you, so I'll try and express it in simpler terms. Regardless of the format you use, if you don't take action to secure data (i.e., encryption) you might as well be posting it on a bulletin board - even if your protocol is binary; the conversion is trivial.

Just in case you didn't catch this, AIM uses HTML; yahoo may, as well, I haven't looked at yahoo messages on-the-wire. XML isn't offered as a 'secure transmission method', but a nearly-universal data-description and encoding format that allows data translation to be much more efficient than the 'efficient' binary data structures you're touting.

Yes it was [developed to solve a certain set of problems], but being a high level network protocol was NOT one of them.

LOL!!! Perhaps you'd like to educate us on what domain of problems XML is designed to resolve and why this particular application falls outside that domain? In fact, this would be a classic case for XML - interoperable data description and encapsulation. What works for data files also works for data exchange, and stream compression eliminates the 'data set size' advantage of your C structs.

Re:No it isn't , it uses flavour-of-the-month XML

[Viol8]

"even if your protocol is binary; the conversion is trivial"

Actually its not unless the person has the specs. Ever tried it? Oh I forgot , every on slashdot as a 190 IQ.

"What works for data files also works for data exchange"

Since when? XML data files are entities that only ger referenced occasionally and hence only have to be parsed occsaionally. They don't get referenced dozens of times a second.
Instead of practising your tediously patronising acronyms why don't you practice getting a clue.

Profit model for servers?

[Srividya]

How will servers for this IM protocol recoup their expenses? Or will they provided competitive reliability at no cost?

Re:What about Gaim?

[rzbx]

"Gaim allows you to connect to all the services that Trillian supports (except possibly IRC)..."

Actually Gaim supports IRC as well. Or did you mean that Trillian does not support IRC? In that case, you should work on your grammar.

"...(because once people are using XMPP and Gaim/Trillian, they don't really need AIM or Yahoo! servers to communicate."

Hold on. To communicate with other AOL AIM users, you MUST connect to their servers. Most AOL AIM users do not use Gaim or Trillian. Also, if they did, it does not necessarily mean they use XMPP. So most users only connection to their Yahoo/AOL AIM/MSN/ICQ/etc. friends, is thru the servers running these protocols.

On the other hand. If the community can work together and distribute the load of IM users and share account info across the servers and also make account creation in Gaim, Trillian, and other clients painless, well, you got yourself a new IM net. It would be great if IM was similar to email (without the spam)...I'm going off thinking again, sorry. Anyway, basically what I'm saying is that the current state of IM clients will not make any near future migration to XMPP any quicker.