[jdev] The future of Jabber/XMPP?

[Bill de hÓra]

On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 10:03 +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:

> 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.

It's not that XML is power hungry (streaming parses do ok cpu wise),
it's that XMPP/XML eats bandwidth and the chatiness (no pun intended) of
XMPP when people aren't saying anything will tend to keep to impact the
phone radio (and thus the battery). Anyone tracing XMPP knows that there
is a lot of presence stuff flying about when people aren't saying
anything and that part for mobile at least, is pretty inefficient.

A well defined mobile XMPP profile seems like a good idea, instead of
grab bagging various XEPs and trying them out. Once there was an optimal
mobile profile, whether or not XML makes sense would be much clearer.

Bill