[jdev] Re: help needed to implement a P2P Chat Client

[Justin Karneges]

On Monday 28 August 2006 14:36, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Ravi wrote:
> > I have an idea of what I am up against. As well as little surprised that
> > nobody tried P2P for chat. I will reconsider my options.
>
> Nobody in the Jabber community has, because our technology has worked
> just fine so far. But ICQ and Skype (mostly) take the p2p approach.

As I understand it, ICQ primarily sends messages over the server, now that it 
uses the OSCAR protocol (just like AIM).

To answer Ravi:

P2P could allow for more optimized routing, but there are far too many 
firewalls to even consider it.  AIM and MSN have proven that server-based 
message routing isn't a problem, even if you have millions of users.  And if 
you don't have millions of users, then it also isn't a problem.  This is the 
nice thing about XMPP decentralization; it is not jabber.org's job to host 
the whole planet.

Additionally, a design goal of XMPP is to allow for easy client development, 
and having the server do a lot of the work sure is easier than P2P.  You can 
see evidence of this by comparing the number of clients that support plain IM 
vs the number that support any kind of P2P extension (e.g. File transfer or 
VoIP).

-Justin