Implementing Jabber Server in other Languages (Was RE: [JDEV] Cus tomizing Jabber server)

[Iain Shigeoka]

At 02:42 PM 5/9/2001 -0500, John Hebert wrote:

> >   On second thought - David Waite's right - we have to look at separating
> >   protocol from server implementation.
>
>My point all along. Apache has the W3C. What does Jabber have? Do we
>need a separate jabber protocol effort separate from the server devel effort?

Yes.  We need to separate protocol from implementation.  Most people I've 
spoken to are at least philosophically in agreement on this issue.  This 
has been a problem since Jabber has evolved as an implementation that 
defined the protocol.  IMHO the time has really come to split the protocol 
off.  Jabber has remained coherent until now because there has only been 
one server implementation available so the implementation has defined the 
protocol.  However, as Jabber.com now as a separate server (albiet very 
closely related) and there are other efforts to develop servers, a separate 
protocol standard is going to become essential.  As I understand it, this 
is something that we can use the Jabber Foundation as a tool to help us 
accomplish.

FYI, I'm very interested in the protocol and implementing my own Jabber 
server (in Java not Python) and have little/no interest in the current C 
implementation.  Reading the protocol docs from this perspective has really 
been what's gotten me interested in better defining the protocols to stand 
alone from the implementation.  As it stands now, it is pretty much 
impossible to write a server based on the existing protocols because they 
are incomplete.  In addition, there is no way to test your protocol 
compliance except in relationship to the current C implementation.  I'm 
hoping to also work on addressing that issue as well (standard compliance 
when a standard exists).

-iain


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