[JDEV] IMPP submission

[David Waite]

Matt Shook wrote:

> I read eliot's IMPP submission on Advogato, and was very impressed, but
> I have a few questions about IMPP itself, and what the Jabber
> community's strategies are.
>
> I realize that several big companies (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft?) are going
> to be submitting too. Do the people involved think that Jabber's
> position as a thoroughly open and flexible standard will give it more
> priority over currently proprietary systems?  Or do they expect to be
> drowned out by the mega-corporations?
>
> Is there a possibility the IETF will declare Jabber the standard, as is,
> or with only minor modifications?
>

It could happen - we fit most of the IMPP requirements, except for
acknoledgement of message receipt, and security.

>
> What if the declared standard is nothing like Jabber?  Do we just make a
> transport for it, and continue on our way?
>
> What if the standard is mostly Jabber-like, but with significant changes
> (i.e. security features)?  Could this result in a complete overhaul of
> the server, clients, transports, etc.?

I cannot speak for everyone here, so I would speak for myself and
acknowledge that this may not be what the majority of the core developers
think. Jabber has several design goals - being built on XML technology,
extensible through that same XML, and to do all required communications
over a single connection from client to server. Beyond that, it would
appear one of the design goals is to make writing a client as simple as
possible - after you support the core protocol you can use it to talk to
any type of user, with extensions to the core (such as the ability to list
agent gateways) also being simple to implement.

If some major innovation comes out of the IMPP group which fits these
goals, then great - I imagine it will be absorbed even if it requires
changes to the protocol. However, if there is a change that goes against
this - for example using a binary data format, UDP packets, or extreme
complexity - it will probably not be absorbed and will become a transport.

-David Waite

> So far, the only submissions on IETF's page appear to be joint works by
> employees of Microsoft, Alcatel and others.  I believe I heard AOL,
> Tribal Voice, and Yahoo will also be submitting.  Are there going to be
> any other open source submissions that I don't know about?
>
> Thanks in advance for any answers
> -Matt Shook