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IETF Publishes Jabber/XMPP RFCs
stpeter writes "The Internet Engineering Task Force has published the XMPP specifications as RFCs. These documents formalize the core protocols developed within the Jabber open-source community, and publication as RFCs represents a major milestone in acceptance of Jabber technologies. Read on for details."
The next version of iChat will include Jabber support.
RFC 3920: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core
RFC 3921: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Instant Messaging and Presence
RFC 3922: Mapping the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to Common Presence and Instant Messaging (CPIM)
RFC 3923: End-to-End Signing and Object Encryption for the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
Right from the Google corporate philosophy: "Google does search. Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat."
While it'd be wonderful for Google to come along in its shining armour and rescue us from the oppression of closed IM protocols, I think the fact that not doing chat is right in their official philosophy is worth noting. Of course Apple's iChat will have support for it, in OS X 10.4, and others may well follow... just maybe not Google.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
It's worth pointing out that XMPP is not just for instant messaging.
XMPP standardizes a method for exchanging structured information streams between autonomous entities -- by they human or automated agent.
Thus, when you (as an engineer) need to set up a network of programs that all communicate with each other, you don't have to roll your own protocol, XMPP can do it for you.
Although IRC "botnets" have existed for quite some time, they are typically very primitive and exist mostly in the realm of script kiddies. Further, IRC is unformatted, unstructured, un-standardized text, making it very difficult to parse reliably.
XMPP allows networks programs to communicate with each other in a "native" language -- data structures -- rather than attempting to glean information from a line of IRC ASCII.
I'm currently using XMPP for several local applications: backup agents communicating with each other, sending and receiving mon monitors and alerts, an improved (RSS-like) syndication system, and more.
This ain't your grandfather's IM protocol.
In a nutshell, it's pretty similar to e-mail, only without indirect routing between servers, and (partly therefore) less store-and-forward, and definitely less latency. It also includes presence information. See also http://www.jabber.org/oscon/2004/jabber-bootcamp.p pt
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber
Since XMPP has been in development for a while, hopefully it shouldn't take too much time for it to climb the Standards Track to full Internet Standard. Right now, XMPP is in the Proposed Standard category, which is the first step (look at the bottom of the list).
The next level up is Draft Standard. To become a Draft Standard, the RFC has to be a Proposed Standard for at least six months, have two independently developed interoperable implementations, and have had "sufficient" successful use. I think that Jabber is pretty much a shoe-in for this category. Several servers been in operation for years from which a large amount of experience with the protocol has been gained, so there shouldn't be any contention about XMPP not being mature. There are many independent implementations, so that shouldn't be an issue either. I don't think there will be any problems getting to Draft Standard in six months.
The final step in the Standards Process is Internet Standard, where the RFC retains its RFC number, and gets the all important STD series number. A standard needs to be in the Draft Standard category at least four months (or until at least one IETF meeting has occurred, whichever comes later). On the technical side, there needs to be a significant implementation of the protocol and much more experience using it needs to be gained. The level of maturity for Standards is such that the protocol is believed to be beneficial to the community. Again, since XMPP has been in the works for over two years now and there are now commercial implementations, I don't think there is a problem with the usage requirements. Furthermore, as the only open messaging protocol, it has a large value to the Internet. Thus, I think getting Jabber to full standard easily is not out of the question.
In about a year, we'll have an Internet Standard for IM and prescence (and an open one, at that)!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
It's not a IM client, it's a protocol that can be easily extended to do just about anything. I'm pretty sure there's something out there that can use video/audio conferencing, if not, then one will soon appear if there's enough demand.
The glossed over version:
jabber is multi-site, like mail. You don't need a server with like-minded people... all jabber users globally can chat with each other (unless, you know, you set up a private jabber server, etc.. same with email)
The protocol is open and extensible, and supports the idea of extended transports.. so the jabber server can act as a gateway for msn/icq/aol/foo/bar/baz. My jabber server deals with all of this... my yahoo/aim/icq/msn contacts are all stored on my jabber server.. I just sign in with whatever jabber client I want, and it all just works.
Don't worry. Audio/Video chat is currently being implemented in the Psi jabber client using Jabber/Helix. It shouldn't take too long before it's finished.
If they made a GIM I am sure they would have a hardcore following, probably the same people using orkut and GMail, but I doubt they could market it to enough people.
It's Google. Sure they could.
And the cool thing is that with IE, Mozilla, _and_ Opera (in the upcoming 7.60 release) supporting XMLHTTPRequest, they could make a web-based IM, without using such nasty stuff as Java or Flash.
Already been done without Java or Flash. (demo).
Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers for this product.
Yeah, IRC has some nice features, and it was the way to do IM before there was such a thing as IM (talk and write be damned). All the cool kids were using it.
Unfortunately, its adoption as a standard ran into some issues:
- RFC 1459, the Internet Relay Chat Protocol RFC was placed into the "Experimental" category.
- Many programs implemented special improvements that were eventually collectively released as RFCs 2810 through 2813. These RFCs, though, were marked as "Informational".
- The IRC Client-To-Client Protocol (CTCP) for sending structured data between clients was released as an Internet Draft, but was never made an RFC.
I think the real killer of IRC as a standard, was the release of RFC 2779, "Instant Messaging / Presence Protocol Requirements". IRC just wouldn't fit this model without a major overhaul, and at that point, you have to question whether it would be worth trying to do that without sacrificing compatibility. It was probably easier to just write a new standard.How does it compare to Jabber? Well, IRC is much simpler (try to write IRC with netcat, then try XMPP).
At it's base level, yes, it's definitely easier. You can do most of what you need for IRC with just a Telnet client. This is kind of fun actually.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
No, it's not. If you'd ever developed with XML, you'd know human-readability is not a major reason to use it.
Not only is XML bloated and so sucks up bandwidth (important if you're still on dial up) but its slow to parse and generally ugly.
XML compresses amazingly well. I have an OpenOffice spreadsheet that's 25MB in uncompressed XML. Zipped up, as OpenOffice files are, it's about 150k. That's an extreme example, but grab any xhtml web page and gzip it.
"But its for developers!" someone shouts. I'm sorry? Just how dumb a developer do you have to be to not be able to grok some efficient binary protocol? "But its a standard" someone else shouts. No it isn't. XML is a shell , you can fill it with any old shit and just because something else is "XML based" doesn't mean it will understand it.
Yes, but XML is a standard shell. Data encoded in XML can be parsed, looked up, accessed, transformed, and represented in code using off-the-shelf toolkits which are extremely good at doing all of those things. You don't have to fuck about writing a parser and a lexer, you can just grab some stuff off Jakarta and go to work on your application instead of its IO format. Furthermore, XML is extensible (that's what the X is for)... if your format requires additional information in the future, or needs to act as a carrier for another format's info, that's already taken care of. Probably a good thing for a message-passing protocol, don't you think?
Using XML for IM is a clear case of jumping on the bandwagon for no reason other than the sheep mentality coming to the fore.
Funny, my first thought when I saw your post was "oh look, another cynical-but-wise wrong-tool-for-the-job anti-XML post".