I’ve been trying to get my mind around Jabber, which I know mainly as an instant messaging platform. I enlisted Boris Mann, genius and recently-inducted member of Jabber Software Foundation (“First rule: don’t chat about Jabber Software Foundation”), to help me understand. He kindly replied:
I wrote a while back that 2006 will be the year of XMPP. Well, IM companies keep getting funding and there’s still lots of activity. Google keeps adding standards-based extensions, Livejournal released a jabber server and integration.
In a nutshell…Jabber goes way beyond IM. Other IM protocols are proprietary systems designed only to do IM. Hence the need for “bots” or other hooks into the system. Jabber is a real-time protocol that uses XML as its base message format. RSS is an approximation of real time at best (is there something new? is there something new?) Jabber can push announcements, have different presence on the network (your home computer is on, your work computer is on, but your mobile phone is where your presence is).
So…lots of different pieces to it. I see it as the next super protocol, bridging the gap between static HTML pages, the polling nature of RSS, and the realtime needs of everything from presence/identity to mobile. Jabber is for people :P
Okay, now I’m excited. Baffled, but excited. And eager to learn more.
Jabber is like the Linux of instant messaging. Except it’s not limited to basic text — since the XMPP protocols are at root a streaming XML technology, you can use Jabber to send any XML data from point A to point B. Think real-time delivery of RSS, geolocation data, emergency alerts, SVG snippets for collaborative whiteboarding, news and sports tickers, and just about any other small data formats. It’s XML so it’s extensible six ways from Sunday. It’s got presence built in so you know when people and applications are online. It’s an open standard so anyone can use it, implement it, deploy it. It’s secure via channel encryption (SSL), strong authentication, etc. It’s spam-free, virus-free, and malware-free. “Jabber: I think, therefore IM.” ;-)
At the risk of plugging my own website… Many people have found the following article I wrote to be enlightening on the subject of Jabber:
http://www.deepdarc.com/2006/05/19/full-time-jabber/
I’m slowly beginning to get it. Am I right in thinking this combines the promise of push with the power of presence-awareness and the potential of personalization?
And why is my screen suddenly covered in flecks of spit?
Hi Rob,
It was good to meet you and your family at BarCamp. Here’s my high-level explanation for Jabber and XMPP.
Jabber is the collection of instant message tools built on top of XMPP.
XMPP is a mechanism for routing bits of XML between users on the internet.
XML is text (like ASCII) but supports all languages and carries its own structure.
Hope that helps. See you soon.