I was speaking with Florian, one of the board members of XSF, and showed him my pattern about HTTP-based filetransfer in IM clients, just as done by Beejive or Meebo.
As far as I remember, the filetransfer argument - namely: it doesn't work in XMPP with 5 parallel standards - was settled down by requiring everyone to implement the most complex one: Jingle File Transfer.
It's like saying we don't need filetransfer to be implemented at all.
Jingle is a such complex protocol, that most of the client developers won't even try to implement it. It's just huge. Even Google didn't really succeed with their own implementation (remember the Cricket:: namespace??) and we don't speak about server-side requirements yet.
The XMPP community is constantly ignoring the fact that we're living in - albeit perhaps the end of - the web age. XML was proven to be inefficient, no matter how you compress it, it's just isn't par with JSON or other formats. Pull parsing technique requires special parsers to be written for XMPP, meaning loss of reuse (although they give the stanzas to normal parsers afterwards), Nokia didn't take XMPP in its production phones for efficiency reasons and all the social networks - facebook, hyves, meebo, gmail - implement their own client2httpd solution instead of the inefficient BOSH.
You can joke about it, but the reality is: XMPP is likely to be superseeded sooner or later.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
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