[jdev] Facebook XMPP

[Scott Lewis]

Hi Folks,

(Lurker materializes)

One comment I would like to make about this discussion of whether or not 
to work on multiprotocol clients/i.e. whytransportsmatter.  

It's not realistic IMHO to expect that the whole world will transfer to 
open protocols/XMPP overnight...as much as some of us would like to see 
this happen.  Rather I think the key to making this happen is make such 
transitions as easy as possible...by:

1) Having lots of clients (whether single protocol or multi-protocol) so 
that UI innovation can occur and create new user value
2) Having lots of good clients
3) Having open clients (open protocol at least...and preferably open 
source implementations)

As important as it is, I think it's still very hard to convince users 
that they should choose interoperability over UI features.  So for 
interoperability to matter to users, open clients have to be as good, 
numerous, and innovative as well as support interoperability.  Further, 
multiprotocol clients can expose the value of interoperability to users 
while still giving them what they want:   easy/familiar connectivity to 
others.

In order to help 1, 2, and 3 along, I/we have taken the approach of 
creating protocol independent communications APIs as part of the ECF 
project:  http://www.eclipse.org/ecf.  It's our hope that by creating a 
protocol-independent, open and extensible 'presence' API (as but one 
example) it makes it possible for developers to create either single 
protocol or multi-protocol clients more easily/quickly/with higher 
quality, and without taking a least common denominator approach to 
features (because both the core and all ECF APIs are extensible at 
runtime via OSGi either in servers or client applications).

Also, such an approach minimizes the effort in creating multiprotocol 
clients...not that it doesn't eliminate it, but it does reduce it to a 
more manageable level for client developers.

Anyway...I'm happy about the Facebook announcement too :).

Scott


Sander Devrieze wrote:
> 2008/5/15 Nick Vidal <nick at inf.ufrgs.br>:
>   
>> Sanders: you do support users who use AIM and MSN, since you *waste your
>> time* making sure coccinella works with transports. And you do support users
>> of Microsoft Windows, since you *wast your time* making sure coccinella
>> works in Windows. And this is a good thing! Thank you! :)
>>     
>
> My reply is here as already said before:
> http://coccinella.im/whytransportsmatter
>
>