The Jabber dev community's time is better spent improving Jabber. Don't look at how to emulate and map the existing IM systems into Jabber; if you do that, you'll constrain yourself by what they do.
Yes, yes, yes! The only way that we'll get people to use Jabber is if it offers something substantially over and above that offered by the other IM clients.
We may not yet have as broad a community base as something like OpenOffice.org or Mozilla, but we have similar advantages in that we all use open, extensible formats and protocols that are conducive to community extension and development.
Eventually Jabber needs to evolve beyond the X+1th IM Jabber client which clones AIM, MSN, or whatever, and provide *substantial* additional functionality not provided elsewhere. It is capable of being *so* much more than just an IM system, and I'd prefer to see people concentrate on big innovations rather than re-implementing the same technology in place already elsewhere.
What I /want/ to do, eventually, as I said is to sit down and start writing JEPs for all the features the other IM systems have. Not to directly map, but to look at what users want from those features. To implement clean, understandable JEPs which provide similar /or preferably better/ implementations of the features. Ideally even to write reusable client libraries for some of the more complex stuff (Jabber voice chat, whatever), to release out there freely. I'd like to sit down with other authors, like the GAIM team and the Psi team and so on, to come up with these JEPs and libraries.
Also a really good idea! I can't help wondering whether it would be really worthwhile to implement a generic JEP that specifies the standard for writing *client* components -- something along the lines of Mozilla XPCOM.
While I acknowledge the risks in pointing to a project that took 5 years to really hit its straps, I think that Mozilla's choice to create the XPCOM technology has provided a fertile ground for developers that promotes the idea of code sharing and re-use.
I know that there are many libraries out there that implement basic Jabber functions: Jabber-Net, pyxmpp, Net::Jabber, etc. However, why re-invent the wheel for higher-level functions over and over on each client, or through each library? A 'lingua franca' that can be spoken by *all* languages to access functions implemented by developers would be invaluable.
Regards,
GuruJ.
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