[JDEV] Jabber DevZone News - Draft Protocol Innovations

[Jabber DevZone]

Draft Protocol Innovations

They are available at http://docs.jabber.org/draft-proto/ in an early
state.

Some of these are small but powerful features (iq:last, events,
expire) and some have been available since 1.2 (zero-knowledge auth,
envelope), but most of these have gone through many different
revisions and been discussed in various development forums for many
months now.

These new innovations ontop of the Jabber architecture swiftly take it
to a leading position in IM features and richness, and are quickly
maturing it into an XML platform for many different applications and
uses.  Here's a few of the important new innovations:

 Cryptography: Clients can now easily support standard presence and
chat signing and encryption (many already do!).   Generic XML
Storage/Publishing: Similiar to a personal home page, a user or their
application has the ability to store any XML data either to themselves
or to anyone else.   Browsing: A new structured way of publishing and
retrieving relationships between jids and namespaces supported by
them.   Dialback: A security mechanism used to prevent domain spoofing
across any server to server connection (this means we now fully meet
and surpass AOL's requirements for an open IM spec!).   Whiteboards: A
simple way to support collaborative image based conversations using
existing technologies.  

There are many other goodies in the list, as well as many new doors
opening due to the above growth, so much potential that it's hard to
keep track of all the different directions that people are going with
Jabber. 

We're all going to be working on these and continually refining them
further.  Many of the new namespaces are already being tested in new
clients and in the 1.4 server, and can be played with to get a real
sense of how they work. Please feel free to share any thoughts on the
jdev at jabber.org mailing list, in the jdev at conference.jabber.org chat
room, or direct specific comments back to the author(s) of the drafts.


Watch for more news as many of these mature and spawn their own
projects and take on a life of their own on jabber.org!

Jer