[JDEV] XMPP implementation questions

[Peter Saint-Andre]

At the recent IETF meeting, I was asked to follow up with the Jabber
developer community about obstacles (or resistance) to implementing
certain aspects of the XMPP specs (<http://www.jabber.org/ietf/>). The
IETF folks perceive the presence of an active developer community as a
Good Thing [tm], so I think they are interested in how likely it is that
the current developer community will implement the specs as written.

The main topics mentioned to me relate to security, specifically SASL
for authentication, TLS for channel encryption, and CPIM + S/MIME for
end-to-end encryption. Do people think they will be able to integrate
existing libraries for these protocols into their applications (or write
their own support, as Rob Norris recently did for SASL in jabberd2)? How
likely is it that existing clients will implement draft-ietf-xmpp-e2e,
which uses CPIM and S/MIME for end-to-end encryption?

>From discussions so far, my sense is that SASL and TLS support will be 
added once it's in the jabberd server, but that client developers are
fairly resistant to adding support for the end-to-end encryption spec
given the need to parse CPIM formats (no existing libraries as far as I
know) and support S/MIME (for which there are libraries, although the
use of S/MIME is not very "Jabberish").

Feel free to reply on or off list.

Thanks!

Peter

P.S. Yes, I owe the community an informational document that clearly
     defines the differences between XMPP and Jabber for things like 
     authentication and session initiation. I will write that document
     by the middle of August.

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
Jabber Software Foundation
http://www.jabber.org/people/stpeter.php