[jdev] Re: The State of Our Code-bases

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hello,

I've been playing with Jabber for more than a year now. I identify
several problems :

1) Jabber is a difficult technology. It is very difficult for end users
to understand what it's all about. I think we lack a good documentation
for end users, covering stuff like what is a Jabber server, a JID, can I
communicate with users on other servers, etc ... Or I haven't found
it yet. If such a documentation exists, it would be interesting to start
a translation project, so Jabber-related websites could use localized
versions.

2) The number of clients/libraries/servers. For somebody coming to
Jabber, it is very difficult to choose a client. There's no comparative
charts saying "this one does this, but doesn't do this, etc ...". There's
http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.php, but I find it quite useless.
There's the same problem for libraries. There are for example 4
different libraries in python (jabberpy, xmpppy, pyxmpp, twisted). How
do they compare with each other ?
	
I see two solutions for this (maybe both should be implemented) :
A. (documentation work :) start a documentation project for clients,
testing each client in detail, listing its features, saying what works
and what is broken. Do the same for libs, components and servers.

B. do something like the Apache Software Foundation : best
clients/libraries/servers should be endorsed by the JSF, so users would
be able to choose between a restricted number of clients/libraries/servers. 
Of course, criterias for the selection should include things like :
- the code must be documented.
- the licence must be free.
- stuff like a public CVS, a bugzilla, etc ... must be available.

All those ideas are non-technical work. I think that technical work has
proven to be unsuccessful with solving the jabber community problems.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net    lnu at gnu.org    GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
| jabber: lucas at linux.ensimag.fr   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net |
| fingerprint: 075D 010B 80C3 AC68 BD4F B328 DA19 6237 023B 3F4F |