True, XMPP is not a web platform, and I don't believe we should be
pushing it as such. Some have suggested us using "online services" over
"web services" in the interest of political correctness. I think the
general consensus HAS to be (even if begrudgingly so) that strong and
easy HTTP support/integration is going to have to be baked into XMPP,
moreso than just BOSH. There's so much going for web services and
programmable APIs that avoiding such an outlet or making it too tough or
laborious for a web dev crowd would cause XMPP technologies to be either
elitist swine tool (kindly forgive my poor choice of words), or a fetish.
The protocol would be alienated. Bill's right about the "black art" of
XMPP deployments. Integration for legacy systems, and eventually
migration to full XMPP architectures, is key.
Everyone's made very valid points about scale, manageability, and
integration, but Mick's spot-on: politically, we'll need someone like a
Facebook to make such a bold endorsement and really open up the
platform, while staying true to the core philosophies.But I really
believe that to take XMPP to the next level and open it up to the entire
development community. :-)
Jason Salas
Interactive Media Director / News Anchor
KUAM News
E-mail: [email protected]
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Mick Thompson wrote:
I think to sum-up the discussion today, we want to see XMPP be used
more, It has many advantages over HTTP in preforming functionality
that is currently implements Atom, SOAP, REST. Polling Sucks, we
agree. However HTTP is the standard. It is what is known, it is what
is currently developed for. Is it the best for realtime data
transfer?...No, push will rule.
Beyond that, how are we getting XMPP support to increase in social
networks? Currently many of the services that start with XMPP API /
gateways have take those down (twitter, gnip) Some say they will
comeback with time. And I think that is too, the real hold up is
scaling the infrastructure(and demand...not as much demand as other
features, so their engineering time is going into other pursuits). It
can be done, it just hasnt. HTTP has been proven in ability to scale,
there are tools/software/hardware to distribute load, and there are
many years of experience out their to support it.
Getting a company with a large user base to use XMPP would a big leap
forward. Hopefully we will hear something from facebook in the near
future. It is going to take someone to push the limits of current
server software in order to see real movement. Ejabberd wouldnt be
able to handle that large of a user base without some serious
modifications.
What is Google running? Isnt it custom? with about 5mil users/month
What are the other big XMPP server instances? What tools would you
use to scale XMPP? What tools are lacking? What should / can the
community be working on?
This is my first post to this list... so I'm sure I'm behind on what
is available, what has been discussed, I dont know it all...so help me :)
Mick Thompson
http://davidmichaelthompson.com
xmpp:[email protected]
On Feb 25, 2009, at 2:59 PM, Aaron Miller wrote:
On Feb 25, 2009, at 3:08 PM, Bill de hOra wrote:
I'm very keen on XMPP, but disagree with a line of thought that says
web communities have a responsibility to make XMPP deployments a
reality.
No I didn't mean to imply there's a responsibility, just that there
are advantages.
First, without meaning to be facetious, XMPP is not a Web technoogy.
Asking why isn't it important to Web communities doesn't add up.
Didn't meant to indicate XMPP was a Web technology, though I do
consider it an XML technology. But the Web has benefited from a lot
of non-Web technologies (Perl, for example), at which point they've
become Web technologies.
XMPP experts are welcome to disagree, but I've seen enough to say
that fronting scalable XMPP deployments are a black art, much the
way scalable HTTP deployments were a decade ago. I'm talking about
*deployments* here - I'm not questioning whether XMPP itself is a
scalable protocol.
That's my impression as well.
I like XMPP, but seriously, from the Web side of things, I think
the perspective must be that this is somehow competing with more
HTTP-centric things like Atom, APP and REST.
I know something about those 3 and I can't agree. Nobody I think
really wants to build web services that require being hammered via
polling, but we do at least know how to build systems to hold up
under that.
True.
Personally, I think it could bring a new dimension to the Web.
XMPP is not the Web. It's a different system.
Correct that XMPP is not the Web. But the Web has a great history of
innovation and inclusion. The development of Javascript frameworks
and AJAX is a great case study. If enough web developers see the
benefits of using XMPP, we can make XMPP part of the Web, the same
way we took a proprietary non-HTML extension called XMLHttp and
created a whole new generation from it.
For example, the Dojo project recently added experimental support for
XMPP, and this is a good sign it's making inroads here. We'll see.
