Slashdot Mirror
Is XMPP the 'Next Big Thing'
Open Standard Lover writes "XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) has been getting a lot of attention during the last month and it seems that the protocol is finally taking off as a general purpose glue to build distributed web applications. It has been covered that AOL was experimenting with an XMPP gateway for its instant messaging platform. XMPP has been designed since the beginning as an open technology for generalized XML routing. However, the idea of an XMPP application server is taking shape and getting supporters. A recent example shows that ejabberd XMPP server can be used to develop a distributed Twitter-like system."
To try to standardise how this is pronounced? eg. "wizzywig", "scuzzy" etc.
'Zemp' would be a nice easy way of saying this.
One thing often overlooked by people is that is kills vendor lock. There are several government agencies which use a proprietary messenging system for instant messenging. Once you introduce true XMPP-compliant products, this kills the stranglehold that some of these vendors have. I'm sure this is true outside the government too.
How to Download YouTube Videos
I poked around their web site and could not find anything about the performance of the protocol. We do a lot of XML based communications at work and even for simple messaging, we find that there is definitely a drop off in speed compared to less verbose techniques. Not just in terms of transmission speed, but a lot of time is spent in the XML parsers. Perhaps this is a by-product of using the XML classes in .NET, but that's the technology we're stuck with. If anyone has some simple benchmarks or tests of XMPP, that would be interesting to see.
Why not? The web is basically a way of sending XML to users. XMPP is a way of sending XML to users. AJAX is an ugly hack. It's fine for sending data from the client to the server, but to get updates from the server you need to keep polling. With XMPP, the server can push XML fragments to the client whenever it wants and some client-side JavaScript could then process them into the DOM. There was a proof of concept a few years ago (before AJAX was a buzzword) where someone integrated an XMPP client into a web browser and used it to deliver updates to the page.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Heck, you could reimplement email over this without massive difficulty.
In reality I think it was one of the first things they implemented in Jabber. A lot of clients, especially the hardcore jabber clients, have different messaging modes: one mode composes a single message, another mode opens up a little chatbox. If you examine the former, you'll find that it's exactly like e-mail, although really it's just a jabber message. Everybody ends up using the chatbox because that's what jabber is for, and many popular clients (eg Pidgin) have only that.
In terms of server and protocol, in my opinion Jabber is fully able to do e-mail. In fact, I'm sure Jabber servers already have e-mail gateways. You just need a client that operates in a manner that implements e-mail as we are used to; for example, most clients just pop up offline messages as soon as you connect, or mark them on your roster instead of presenting you with a stored list of messages that you can manipulate mailbox style.
Perhaps it is just the library I've used to develop an XMPP client, but I found implementing a client a complete PITA. Most specifically I couldn't find *anything* that simply stated you have to do X, Y, and Z to "do" XMPP. It required a lot of trial-and-error (lots of XMPP packet dumping) with another XMPP client to "subscribe" to someone else (aka get on their buddy list), to notify everyone you're online, and to send messages. All of the RFCs and JEPs are neat if you know what you're doing, but otherwise it just confuses the hell out of you trying to figure out exactly what it takes to make even the most basic client.
XMPP also requires you to keep a fair amount of state information. Stuff I seemingly would think should be kept by the server. I suppose by making the server really dumb (basically a router) you really put the eXtensible in XMPP but at the cost of a more complex client.
On its surface XMPP looks great: an open-source IM protocol!! Once you, the newb, get into it it gets really ugly.
Then again, maybe I made a poor choice in a python package or I just happened to not find that key page with google that basically explains my problem away (and that's all it is is acclimation, it's not terribly difficult once you "get it"). Not even the wikipedia page explains inner-working details of XMPP. And FWIW, I was *trying* to do what this story was saying XMPP is going to be so great for: server glue for a distributed web-based application. Where I sit now with what [little] I know: I completely disagree until someone wraps it all up into a super-easy library (which shouldn't be too hard).
:wq