[jdev] JEP-0124 HTTP Binding

[Ian Paterson]

> It's a cleverly designed protocol.

Thanks very much Jack... although I've been doing my best to keep that a
secret! (If patenting a technique is against your 'religion', then
building it into a relatively 'obscure' public standard, that is below
your competitors' radars, is the next best option.)

Now that the cat is pretty much out of the bag, the introduction of the
JEP should probably be rewritten  so people can 'get' the underlying
innovative idea easily on first reading. Apologies to everyone here for
not doing that from the start. Please understand how tempting it was to
either patent the technique, or just to keep it secret, instead of
publishing it freely.

In defence of the low-profile approach, two years after publishing
JEP-0124, Jabber-based HTTP clients are still unique in that they always
receive messages in a fraction of a second - they consume less bandwidth
too. (MSN Web Messenger takes up to 21 seconds to receive an 'instant'
message.) While this state of affairs lasts, I hope it helps to persuade
users to adopt Jabber clients instead of those based on closed
protocols.

I also hope that JEP-0124 will be the 'killer technology' that motivates
AJAX application developers to base communications on the XMPP standard
instead of proprietary protocols (AJAX -> Asynchronous JavaScript And
XMPP). This will allow developers to benefit from the existing Jabber
protocols and implementations. It will also help drive our shared vision
for XMPP as an XML Routing and Presence protocol (rather than just an IM
protocol).

- Ian