[JDEV] The Important Things

[Michael F Lin]

Here is Mike Lin's list of Things The Jabber Open Source Community Needs To
Do, In No Particular Order. Most of these are Really Hard Problems, and
most of them are problems I don't have a solution to. Not everyone will
agree with everything on this list. That is OK; we are a heterogeneous
community.

1. Our transport layer needs a better framing scheme (length prefixing or
byte sentinel). Requiring the Jabber router (half of the server) to parse
all payload content is an easily avoidable performance and scalability
hindrance. Look into BEEP.
2. We need to fill in the rest of the sendmail-like infrastructure that
will allow Jabber to scale across the Internet and into Intranets as one
interoperating network. This means we need well-defined support for
multi-hop routing, and we need well-defined, end-to-end store and forward.
Especially, we need to figure out how presence should behave in a
failure-prone environment, which is the only new problem we are solving
here.
3. We need to figure out how to scalably transport large payloads in-band
(or at least in a band that adopts JID routing).
4. We need to figure out how to have Jabber endpoints that deal with a
large amount of realtime ("instant") traffic from all over the cloud under
one JID. Serializing everything across one TCP connection probably will not
do.
5. Everyone thinks that web services (SOAP, UDDI) combined with presence
(Jabber) is a big and important thing. We have to figure out exactly why,
and how to build them on top of Jabber. Especially, we need to integrate
Jabber with existing and upcoming web service tooling (Tomcat, .NET,
DotGNU).
6. We need to figure out security and authentication. SSL is okay, but
transport-level encryption is less important than network-wide
authentication and trust based on interoperable PKI, whether we adopt a CA
model (like X.509) or a web of trust model (like PGP), or some combination
of the two (which I consder most likely). We are looking for much more than
shelling to GPG here. Look into the W3C XML Signature and XKMS work.
7. Finally, we need to continue the standardization and documentation
efforts. We need to see how previous standards have successfully evolved in
communities with many varied and conflicting interests and model our
processes on theirs.

-Mike



                                                                                                                                       
                      Michael Bauer                                                                                                    
                      <bauer at michaelbau        To:       jdev at jabber.org                                                               
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                      01/08/2002 07:48                                                                                                 
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Kind of picking up on my own thread, what exactly are the important
things?

B)

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Michael Bauer      http://www.michaelbauer.com      bauer at michaelbauer.com

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