> It's a cleverly designed protocol. Thanks very much Jack... although I've been doing my best to keep that a secret! (If patenting a technique is against your 'religion', then building it into a relatively 'obscure' public standard, that is below your competitors' radars, is the next best option.)
Now that the cat is pretty much out of the bag, the introduction of the JEP should probably be rewritten so people can 'get' the underlying innovative idea easily on first reading. Apologies to everyone here for not doing that from the start. Please understand how tempting it was to either patent the technique, or just to keep it secret, instead of publishing it freely. In defence of the low-profile approach, two years after publishing JEP-0124, Jabber-based HTTP clients are still unique in that they always receive messages in a fraction of a second - they consume less bandwidth too. (MSN Web Messenger takes up to 21 seconds to receive an 'instant' message.) While this state of affairs lasts, I hope it helps to persuade users to adopt Jabber clients instead of those based on closed protocols. I also hope that JEP-0124 will be the 'killer technology' that motivates AJAX application developers to base communications on the XMPP standard instead of proprietary protocols (AJAX -> Asynchronous JavaScript And XMPP). This will allow developers to benefit from the existing Jabber protocols and implementations. It will also help drive our shared vision for XMPP as an XML Routing and Presence protocol (rather than just an IM protocol). - Ian
