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.
