[JDEV] Jabber DevZone News - IM Unified

[Jabber DevZone]

IM Unified

The following was posted by tsbandit at jabber.org via the Jabber DevZone web site (http://dev.jabber.org/):

The goal of the IM Unified group has been to allow users of many
different IM networks to talk to one another in a secure fashion.


This organization was founded in July 2000, and subsequently released
their protocol standard at the end of August, 2000.  This protocol is
to be supported by the major IM Unified players, such as excite, MSN,
and Yahoo!.


Although many goals are shared between Jabber, IM Unified, and the
IETF, Jabber never joined the IM Unified group, favoring to wait for a
IETF specification to be fleshed out.  IM Unified and Jabber both have
plans to support the IETF's protocol standard when it is made
available.


Currently, as far as I know, only one IM Unified player, Excite at Home,
has made use of the IMU protocol in their Excite Messenger client.  I
have just finished the preliminary work on a IMU Login service for the
Jabber Server.  This will allow IMU compatable clients to log into a
Jabber Server, using the IMU protocol.


While not in release state yet, this IMU service is able to
authenticate, manage roster lists, presence, and messenging.  I will
begin work on the IMU transport shortly, which will allow a Jabber
user to log into their accounts on the other IMU services, such as
Excite at Home, Yahoo, or MSN.  This will be a nice step forward, since
only one Transport will be required to talk with all of these
services.


I've taken the Excite Messenger out for a test drive, and the
drawbacks I see from the start are that it cannot be used to log into
any other server, aside from Excite's server, so currently it will be
unable to make use of the Jabber IMU Login Service.. =[  I've emailed
Excite about this, and hopefully I will get a good responce from them,
in the Interest of Interoperability.. =].


In the meantime this IMU Login Service Offers a working, freely
available, Open-Source IMU Server solution for the other IM Unified
members to use, or other companies looking to create an interoperable
client.


Since the code is currently not in release yet, it can be obtained
from Jabber.org's CVS as the "imu-agent" module.  Information on
obtaining code from CVS may be found here.
If you have specific questions for me, you can post them in reply to
this News item, or send me an email or Jabber message to
tsbandit at jabber.org (No Subscriptions Please, my roster is already out
of control)

http://jabber.org/?oid=1592