Here is Mike Lin's list of Things The Jabber Open Source Community Needs To Do, In No Particular Order. Most of these are Really Hard Problems, and most of them are problems I don't have a solution to. Not everyone will agree with everything on this list. That is OK; we are a heterogeneous community.
1. Our transport layer needs a better framing scheme (length prefixing or byte sentinel). Requiring the Jabber router (half of the server) to parse all payload content is an easily avoidable performance and scalability hindrance. Look into BEEP. 2. We need to fill in the rest of the sendmail-like infrastructure that will allow Jabber to scale across the Internet and into Intranets as one interoperating network. This means we need well-defined support for multi-hop routing, and we need well-defined, end-to-end store and forward. Especially, we need to figure out how presence should behave in a failure-prone environment, which is the only new problem we are solving here. 3. We need to figure out how to scalably transport large payloads in-band (or at least in a band that adopts JID routing). 4. We need to figure out how to have Jabber endpoints that deal with a large amount of realtime ("instant") traffic from all over the cloud under one JID. Serializing everything across one TCP connection probably will not do. 5. Everyone thinks that web services (SOAP, UDDI) combined with presence (Jabber) is a big and important thing. We have to figure out exactly why, and how to build them on top of Jabber. Especially, we need to integrate Jabber with existing and upcoming web service tooling (Tomcat, .NET, DotGNU). 6. We need to figure out security and authentication. SSL is okay, but transport-level encryption is less important than network-wide authentication and trust based on interoperable PKI, whether we adopt a CA model (like X.509) or a web of trust model (like PGP), or some combination of the two (which I consder most likely). We are looking for much more than shelling to GPG here. Look into the W3C XML Signature and XKMS work. 7. Finally, we need to continue the standardization and documentation efforts. We need to see how previous standards have successfully evolved in communities with many varied and conflicting interests and model our processes on theirs. -Mike Michael Bauer <bauer@michaelbau To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] er.com> cc: Sent by: Subject: [JDEV] The Important Things jdev-admin@jabber .org 01/08/2002 07:48 PM Please respond to jdev Kind of picking up on my own thread, what exactly are the important things? B) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Bauer http://www.michaelbauer.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev