[jdev] The future of Jabber/XMPP?

[Nicolas Vérité]

My take: http://www.google.fr/trends?q=xmpp
No XMPP ain't dyin'... ;-)

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:03, Dave Cridland <dave at cridland.net> wrote:
> 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.
> --
> Dave Cridland - mailto:dave at cridland.net - xmpp:dwd at dave.cridland.net
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-- 
Nicolas Vérité (Nÿco) mailto:nicolas.verite at gmail.com
Jabber ID : xmpp:nyco at jabber.fr
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