[jdev] The future of Jabber/XMPP?

[Dave Cridland]

On Sat Jul 10 22:39:23 2010, Yves Goergen wrote:
> 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? Now even Google  
> tries
> to introduce yet another messaging protocol that isn't as verbose  
> as XML
> [citation needed].

Okay. Some observations:

1) There was a period in the recent past when virtually any major  
organization with an online presence needed IM. Whenever that's  
happened in recent years, they've picked up XMPP instead of rolling  
their own. There's fewer big names left that haven't got IM one way  
or another now, hence less noise to make - this will always be the  
most visible XMPP headline news. Less obvious is the BBC's recent  
deployment, for web purposes, and many similar ones.

2) XMPP deployment - in the IM space - is massive. Every major  
software supplier in the IM space now provides XMPP - through  
gateways in the cases of MSFT and IBM, but still XMPP. Although  
corporate enterprise IM has a strong contigent of OCS, there's a  
significant portion of "pure" XMPP there, and in the  
government/military space, XMPP is very much a hot topic.

3) In terms of movement in the specifications - new extensions, etc -  
we're moving fast enough that it's actually quite hard to keep up,  
across the board - we're certainly seeing clients specializing into  
various areas, and I think it's happening to an increasing extent for  
servers, too - even if I think all of the server implementors would  
generally say they're unspecialized for now.

4) I would note that, as far as I can tell (bearing in mind I've not  
worked with XMPP specifically for as long as many others in this  
thread), there are about the same number of clients and servers under  
active, vibrant development as there have been for ages. The  
population of the set is volatile - but the numbers seem pretty  
stable.

5) In terms of Google specifically - Google is a large, broad-based,  
company with a momentum all of its own. Very much like Microsoft,  
it's important to remain objective when looking at what they're  
doing. So while Google have insisted (on multiple occasions) that  
XMPP, using XML, is way too verbose (and therefore power hungry) for  
mobile, I'd note that by contrast Nokia's use of XMPP to the handset  
appears to be entirely standards-based.

So in summary, although XMPP's progress and successes are a lot less  
newsworthy, and the landscape is almost unrecognizable compared to a  
few years ago, it's no less vibrant, and the future for XMPP is only  
disappointing because it's a descent into mundane ubiquity.

Dave.
-- 
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