Re: Jabber network vs. multi-protocol IM clients (was: A question about chatting)
On 7/22/06, Rodolfo Medina <rodolfo.medina@gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
I've been trying many of the above tools.
I confess that it's not clear to me what the advantage should be
in using Jabber with its more or less complicated system
of gateways instead of Gaim or other multi-protocol IM client
that connect "natively" to ICQ or MSN
in a more direct and simple way.
I'm not stating the latter are best, just that maybe
the Jabber network is a more advanced tool but I haven't catched
in all my tests where its superiority stands.
Can anyone point this out?
Thanks,
Rodolfo
Well, I was hoping that Paul Johnson would take this one, because
I have seen him give some good arguments for Jabber and I have
a feeling that he could do a better job, but I guess he is not going
to respond this time. So here it goes.
The core advantage of Jabber, from my point of view, is that it is a
free and open protocol that does not have to be reverse engineered
to be used with various clients. Instead of hacks like multi-protocol
clients and highly specific gateways, such as the ones MS and
Yahoo are presumably going to be using (per their recent
agreement), Jabber has ground up interoperability between many
servers and many clients.
Andy Updegrove has a good article on some of the benefits of open
protocols:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20060715120938415
Also, Jabber is decentralized - anyone can run their own Jabber
server. MSN, AIM and IQC servers are all run by the parent company.
I don't really want my messages going though Microsoft or AOL on
general principle, even if I trust them not mess with my messages.
So, personally, I use Jabber for some of the same reasons that I
use Linux, Open Document Format (ODF) office files, and valid
(X)HTML. It's about freedom and interoperability.
In terms of capabilities, Jabber is at somewhat of a disadvantage
right now. Voice chat (Jingle) is currently limited to Google's GTalk
client, customized builds of Kopete, and the Psi development branch
(I think thats all of them). Psi and Kopete should have Jingle enabled
in the near future, and other clients shouldn't be to far behind.
Video chat is further off, because the specs are not as far along and
it may be harder to implement. On the other hand, the reverse
engineered clients don't necessarily have voice and video even though
the protocols can handle it (because of the difficulty of reverse
engineering those parts).
But Jabber can and will be extended to equal and surpass the
proprietary protocols. Its technical name is eXtensible Messaging
and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and it lives up to that name.
It already has some specialized extensions that do not have
equivalents in other protocols.
As for Gateways, one reason to use them instead of using
multi protocol clients, is that it is more of a halfway step to
using Jabber exclusively. The other point is that this way
of doing things fits with Jabber's idea of keeping complexity
on the server and out of the client.
Cheers,
Kelly
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