[jdev] The future of Jabber/XMPP?

[Matthew Wild]

On 10 July 2010 22:39, Yves Goergen <nospam.list at unclassified.de> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Today I noticed that there hasn't been an update to the Openfire Jabber
> server in more than 14 months, where 2007 and 2008 have been very active
> years. There's still a lot of open issues in the project. In the past
> years, a few Jabber projects (like legacy IM gateways or PHP libraries)
> have fallen asleep for indefinite time. The Psi developers push
> long-desired features further and further into the future while the
> Linux package downloads fall behind in versions. (Currently their
> website it only half available.)
>

In the land of open-source, projects always have their ups and downs,
projects are always dying, or going into auto-pilot, but new projects
are always starting. You can have a hand in each of these :)

> Sometime in the last decade I saw a more or less great momentum towards
> open IM standards, with Google Talk and GMX/web.de introducing XMPP
> services or Apple iChat supporting the protocol. Recently, Facebook also
> joined the club (without s2s AFAIK), but I have the vague impression
> that the whole thing slowly falls asleep. There hasn't been real great
> leaps in the near past, or did I just miss them?

I think you missed them. XMPP seems to me stronger than ever, in the
IM space, but it is also doing surprisingly well in the non-IM
use-cases, where XMPP has turned out to be a very viable platform on
which to build all kinds of realtime data-pushing apps.

I started the Prosody project a year or two back, and we now have a
strong community, growing all the time. People are joining us all the
time, whether from other inactive servers, from non-XMPP IM platforms
or because they are looking to build new services powered by XMPP.

Depending on where you're viewing from, progress can look slow or
inexistent. However such is always the way, XMPP was never going to
take over the world overnight (though I never stop believing it may,
it helps :) ). It takes time for people already accustomed to the
"old" ways to invest development time and effort into implementing or
switching existing infrastructure to use XMPP - so take-up always
appears to be slow.

Anyway, as I said further up... whether and how well XMPP continues to
meet its goals is up to you, me, and everyone else on this list. If
you're a developer, find a project and get contributing, if you aren't
then there are still other ways to help in the mission, see the
relatively new communications team for example:
http://xmpp.org/xsf/teams/communication/

Regards,
Matthew