Hi Folks,
(Lurker materializes)
One comment I would like to make about this discussion of whether or not
to work on multiprotocol clients/i.e. whytransportsmatter.
It's not realistic IMHO to expect that the whole world will transfer to
open protocols/XMPP overnight...as much as some of us would like to see
this happen. Rather I think the key to making this happen is make such
transitions as easy as possible...by:
1) Having lots of clients (whether single protocol or multi-protocol) so
that UI innovation can occur and create new user value
2) Having lots of good clients
3) Having open clients (open protocol at least...and preferably open
source implementations)
As important as it is, I think it's still very hard to convince users
that they should choose interoperability over UI features. So for
interoperability to matter to users, open clients have to be as good,
numerous, and innovative as well as support interoperability. Further,
multiprotocol clients can expose the value of interoperability to users
while still giving them what they want: easy/familiar connectivity to
others.
In order to help 1, 2, and 3 along, I/we have taken the approach of
creating protocol independent communications APIs as part of the ECF
project: http://www.eclipse.org/ecf. It's our hope that by creating a
protocol-independent, open and extensible 'presence' API (as but one
example) it makes it possible for developers to create either single
protocol or multi-protocol clients more easily/quickly/with higher
quality, and without taking a least common denominator approach to
features (because both the core and all ECF APIs are extensible at
runtime via OSGi either in servers or client applications).
Also, such an approach minimizes the effort in creating multiprotocol
clients...not that it doesn't eliminate it, but it does reduce it to a
more manageable level for client developers.
Anyway...I'm happy about the Facebook announcement too :).
Scott
Sander Devrieze wrote:
2008/5/15 Nick Vidal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Sanders: you do support users who use AIM and MSN, since you *waste your
time* making sure coccinella works with transports. And you do support users
of Microsoft Windows, since you *wast your time* making sure coccinella
works in Windows. And this is a good thing! Thank you! :)
My reply is here as already said before:
http://coccinella.im/whytransportsmatter
