[JDEV] What does een IM system need to reach the end user (Was: Re: [JDEV] Poll about who will use Jabber when Trillian comes out)

[Andrew Sayers]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2003 at 11:38:19PM +0200, Mattias Campe wrote:
> True, they don't care how it's done, but they do care about the 
> functionality that is offered. Although I never implemented a 
> (server-side) transport, I looks hard to me to offer MSN video chat, 
> file transfer,... because it looks peer-to-peer to me. So, those 
> features look more easy to implement client-side

I can only speak for MSN here (which is my chosen speciality)...

MSN file transfer is p2p, though writing support for FT-mangling into a
transport is fairly easy.  The problem is that people running servers
mightn't like the bandwidth involved (although it's no worse than the
bandwidth in HTTP transfers).  If client authors want to support the
(fairly trivial) MSNFTP protocol and/or call a standalone app that
does, it's also pretty easy to do it that way.

Other weird-and-wonderful add-ons aren't part of the core MSN protocol,
and can be handled by external applications.  For example, "Netmeeting"
is an H.323 conversation, and I'm told that "Voice conversation" is
H.323 wrapped up inside SIP.  The problem there will be finding a
cross-protocol way of negotiating a session of arbitrary type.  To my
knowledge, Jabber doesn't have such a mechanism at all (yet?), but
there's no reason to believe that cross-platform negotiation will put
any more work onto client authors than normal negotiation.

	- Andrew
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