[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[Andrew Sayers]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2003 at 04:16:19AM -0700, Justin Karneges wrote:
> The problem is that the current Jabber transport software is notable for being 
> much less featureful than the multi-IM clients out there.  If you could make 
> all of the transports super-featureful with file transfer and everything 
> (which I guess is fine for local use) then you basically would end up with a 
> multi-IM library that uses XMPP for IPC.  My gut says this is overkill, but 
> it would certainly work I guess.

One of the problems with the Jabber model of IM is that transports can
only ever support those features which are supported by both networks.
I'm writing an MSN transport.  I can't make it support arbitrary
types of OOB session, because Jabber doesn't support it, and I can't
support explanatory status messages, because MSN doesn't support it.
Just sending messages between clients is pretty complicated, because MSN
only supports a weird, broken, many-to-many chat mechanism.  In general,
for people who want all the features all of the time, Jabber's thin
client/fat server model is a poor solution.

Another problem with transports in Jabber is that they all seem to have
been written a long time ago, and then abandoned.  This means that they
haven't kept up with recent protocol advancements (ours and others'),
and known issues have gone un-fixed.  The following may sound like a
personal rant, but you'll just have to trust me that I lack the language
skills to make it sound otherwise :)

Part of the problem is that first generation of transport authors (so to
speak) left the job half-done, with poorly written, poorly documented,
hard-to-maintain code.  Part of the problem may be the (unintentional?)
attitude of most Jabber developers that transports are just a temporary
sticking plaster to support "legacy" networks until the rest of the
world realises that Jabber is superior (which, in many ways, it is not).

I think it's quite unlikely that Jabber will become the only remaining
IM network any time in the near future, and I'd be quite upset if it did
- the notion of IM is still evolving, and having multiple competing
networks is a good way of spurring this on.  Even in this thread, people
have been saying that we must improve this or that to keep up with MSN,
AOL, ICQ, etc.

Jabber isn't the perfect choice for everyone, and it never will be.
Some people need services only available in MSN Messenger.  Some people
only have friends using AIM.  Some people need to keep up with all the
latest IM nick-nacks.  These people will never use Jabber, so their
friends will always need transports.

	- Andrew
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