[JDEV] Best way to drive Jabber adoption?

[David Waite]

Timothy Carpenter wrote:

>The issue of getting transports firm is a given. Blocking? Well this might
>therefore suggest a personal server to provide the transports after
>all...but with account details held centrally to enable multipoint access
>with one logon.
>
>Tim
>

A personal server still does not account for how alien the existing 
'legacy' protocols are. Whether the handling of protocols is done 
locally or remotely, you would still be creating a 1-to-1 mapping of 
remote system features to jabber protocol. This includes having support 
for things like many-to-many conversations for MSN, to a talk-like 
groupchat for ICQ (assuming they still use that), to IMVironments for 
Yahoo. Even if you map the wide range of message formatting options to 
xhtml on the inbound, you would still need a way to represent the remote 
user's formatting capabilities to the Jabber client.

Once you start tightly coupling protocol for talking to IM users based 
on their network provider, the only advantage you could gain from having 
a transport is language neutrality - you will have to maintain 
compatible versions of jabber clients to the transports. Since these 
aren't packaged together, it becomes an issue that my client might 
support the version of the MSN bindings provided by a service provider, 
but not the version of the ICQ bindings.

The reason that the transports aren't considered by many to be the 
'focus' of the jabber community is that dealing with all these technical 
incompatibities as well as legal and political actions from the legacy 
system providers will limit the amount of work that can be put into 
enhancing our own protocol and implementations.

The limited amount of effort the community is capable of can either be 
focused either on supporting existing functionality in legacy systems, 
or we can add genuinely new functionality like group calendaring and 
events. In the end, it is a choice for individuals rather than of the 
group. However, the state of things today could be taken to represent 
where the majority interest lies.

-David Waite