Mickael Remond a écrit :
Hello Sylvain,
Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
Instant Messaging. That's what the thread is talking about, I think.
Well it's broader than that IMO. I would have been surprised to hear
that today's servers can't handle large amount of IM messages on their
own but today the new kid on the block is PubSub/PEP and servers seem
to be quite far behind these days.
The debate was on Facebook IM and XMPP.
>From what I understand from this thread, the question was why Facebook
did not use XMPP for its IM and what should we do to make XMPP more
attractive for these type of companies.
Instant Messaging being the most mature part of XMPP, it makes sense to
focus on IM in this debate.
I disagree. IM is mature but it also makes the other extensions based on
XMPP look like the poor children of the protocol.
The reasons why Facebook hasn't really pushed for XMPP look rather clear
to me. If you only want IM and you have a large existing web
infrastructure, integrating XMPP is certainly not trivial and it's
probably easier to go for regular polling and/or HTTP/Comet based solution.
A company needs to see the value beyond IM to start considering spending
resources on XMPP. Is there an actual business value in IM these days in
social network? Even if there is, does is it a smart business choice for
a company like Facebook or Twitter to use XMPP?
Regarding pubsub, you can see it as a classical chicken / egg problem:
Client or server first ? Without good client support, there is no good
incentive to improve on pubsub (and get feedback) and vice versa.
I'd say you need better server support first with at least servers that
implement what they implement correctly.
That said we have deployed pubsub to large scale as well in a gaming
platform.
I assume you didn't use mnesia to store pubsub nodes and items to scale
though.
- Sylvain
