Given that the 7th XMPP Council recently completed its work and a new Council will be elected tomorrow, I thought this would be a good time to take stock of XMPP standardization efforts.
First, some stats: We have 4 Final XEPs, 60 Draft XEPs, and 45 Experimental XEPs. We need to push more Draft specs to Final. We need to deprecate a few of the Draft specs (IMHO). And we need to move some of the Experimental specs to Draft (and some to Deferred because they haven't been updated in 12+ months). Naturally we also have some Internet-Drafts in process, the main ones being the "bis drafts" (updates to the XMPP RFCs). I see the following areas of focus over the next 12 months. 1. Jingle. We need to get this done. I think we're very close, thanks to the discussions at the XMPP Summit in Portland. Also I know of many implementations in progress, and those developers are sharing insights to move faster. On the Jingle list, Robert McQueen mentioned the idea of an IRL Jingle developer meeting (perhaps in Cambridge, UK) to bang out final details and work on interoperability, but I don't know if we need that to move the specs to Draft. The XEPs in question are 166, 167, 168, 176, 177, 181, and 234. I would love to get these done before the end of 2008, and I think that's quite doable. (Folks are also interested in various Jingle extensions -- screen sharing, call transfers, multi-party Jingle sessions, etc. -- but we can work on those in parallel.) 2. HTTP/XMPP hybridization. This includes lower-level protocols like BOSH (currently undergoing a bit of a cleanup) as well as higher-level applications like OAuth, microblogging, and various PEP payloads (e.g., how do we make sure these all play nicely with everything that's happening in the social networking space?). There has been some interest in standardizing BOSH at the IETF, but I don't see that as a high priority, probably because I know it wouldn't be a lot of fun. 3. Security. We seem to have a bit of momentum around end-to-end encryption using TLS, and it would be great to see that more widely implemented and deployed. I see this as something that will come together more in 2009 than this year (e.g., all those client developers who are adding Jingle support to their clients may be too busy right now to add e2e support as well). Other topics here include DoS prevention (XEP-0205), spam blocking (XEP-0159), abuse reporting (XEP-0161), and phishing prevention (XEP-0165). 4. Plumbing. Here I would include Stream Management (XEP-0198) and Component Connections (XEP-0225). Boring, but necessary. 5. Core. We need to publish the revised RFCs. After a few years of intermittent attention, I think they're very close to done. We need more people to review them for a final sanity check. They also have references to various XEPs (e.g., we moved Server Dialback from RFC 3920 to XEP-0220), so we need to move those to Draft before we ask the IESG to approve the bis drafts. (There are also some smaller features that would be good to finish up, such as invisibility -- go XEP-0186! -- but there are relatively few of those, I think.) I will post separately about Experimental XEPs to be deferred, Draft XEPs to advance to Final, and a few other issues. Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre https://stpeter.im/
