Jabber Was Announced on Slashdot 25 Years Ago This Week (slashdot.org) 32
25 years ago, Slashdot's CmdrTaco posted an announcement from Slashdot reader #257. "Jabber is a new project I recently started to create a complete open-source platform for Instant Messaging with transparent communication to other Instant Messaging systems (ICQ, AIM, etc).
"Most of the initial design and protocol work is done, as well as a working server and a few test clients."
You can find the rest of the story on Wikipedia. "Its major outcome proved to be the development of the XMPP protocol." ("Based on XML, it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities.") Originally developed by the open-source community, the protocols were formalized as an approved instant messaging standard in 2004 and have been continuously developed with new extensions and features... In addition to these core protocols standardized at the IETF, the XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions...
XMPP features such as federation across domains, publish/subscribe, authentication and its security even for mobile endpoints are being used to implement the Internet of Things.
"Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses..."
Slashdot reader #257 turned out to be Jeremie Miller (who at the time was just 23 years old). And according to his own page on Wikipedia, "Currently, Miller sits on the board of directors for Bluesky Social, a social media platform."
"Most of the initial design and protocol work is done, as well as a working server and a few test clients."
You can find the rest of the story on Wikipedia. "Its major outcome proved to be the development of the XMPP protocol." ("Based on XML, it enables the near-real-time exchange of structured data between two or more network entities.") Originally developed by the open-source community, the protocols were formalized as an approved instant messaging standard in 2004 and have been continuously developed with new extensions and features... In addition to these core protocols standardized at the IETF, the XMPP Standards Foundation (formerly the Jabber Software Foundation) is active in developing open XMPP extensions...
XMPP features such as federation across domains, publish/subscribe, authentication and its security even for mobile endpoints are being used to implement the Internet of Things.
"Designed to be extensible, the protocol offers a multitude of applications beyond traditional IM in the broader realm of message-oriented middleware, including signalling for VoIP, video, file transfer, gaming and other uses..."
Slashdot reader #257 turned out to be Jeremie Miller (who at the time was just 23 years old). And according to his own page on Wikipedia, "Currently, Miller sits on the board of directors for Bluesky Social, a social media platform."
Jabber walked so that Pidgin could fly. (Score:4, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD. https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
Part of the early 2000s XML solves everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Jabber was part of the wave of technologies and early dev 2000s that thought XML/XSLT could solve waves of interoperability and middleware issues. Instead it was just bloat in an era where bandwidth still mattered and Apache Cocoon died fast. JSON replaced XML because you didn't need to sort your backslash closing object tax of annoyance. CSS became more important than XHTML, SOAP, REST and everything superceded it.
XMPP failed because there was no incentive for Google and Facebook to let their users outside the gardens. The same issues plague the decentralized platforms of today like Mastodon.
Been around long to see history repeat is fun.
Re:Part of the early 2000s XML solves everything (Score:5, Insightful)
XMPP failed because there was no incentive for Google and Facebook to let their users outside the gardens
XMPP failed because Google and Facebook did the old embrace extend extinguish on their users. Way too often folks believe that some technology held something back or kept it from doing whatever.
But the reality is that companies always want their wall gardens, they don't want a free market. The gibber jabber that JSON > XML is just nonsense. Binary is way faster than JSON but there's reasons why people select JSON. Indeed XML was being used as a panacea, but you can literally use that argument for JSON at this point too. The number of times people have decided to get "creative" with type for a given value is numerous. There's no end to those who bemoan JSON's lack of type safety. And folks who try to fix it [json-schema.org] unironically just building XML 2.0.
As you say
Been around long to see history repeat is fun.
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JSON, like XML are good in small doses. Need to stick an array of values into an Oracle column? A JSON array is a good way to do it. ["value1", "value2", "value3"], but beyond that, there be dragons.
I remember running a Jabberd instance on our corporate VPN back in the day. It worked fine.
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One of my favorite Slashdot sigs from other users has long been something like "XML is like violence: if it's not working, use more." It seems some people really took that to heart.
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Well, there are smart people and then there are those you describe to adequately...
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Not quite true. You can use JSON as a replacement for the traditional UNIX "one key-value pair per line" config or data file. Makes no sense to do so, obviously.
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XMPP failed because Google and Facebook did the old embrace extend extinguish on their users.
More precisely, Google (at least) found that closed competitors were eating its lunch in the messaging space, and (incorrectly, IMO) concluded that the reason was that being tied to an open standard made it impossible for Google to innovate rapidly enough to hold and build messaging market share. So, to become more agile and win the messaging wars, the logic went, Google needed to abandon XMPP and move to something proprietary that they could enhance, extend or change at will.
Obviously it didn't work, and
Re: Part of the early 2000s XML solves everything (Score:1)
Re:Part of the early 2000s XML solves everything (Score:4, Informative)
XMPP isn't even good XML. It's weirdly annoying.
XMPP absolutely requires an event-based parser, because the entire conversation from start to end is a single XML document that doesn't end until the client disconnects. So you absolutely need a parser that can deal with XML as it comes.
It's also not terribly high performance friendly. There's no clear framing, so the only way to tell where a message ends is to parse XML until you reach the end. You don't get a friendly protocol that tells you "Hey, next message is 520 bytes long", so that you can conveniently allocate a buffer upfront and read the whole thing in one go.
Besides that, it appears that XMPP's dialect deviates somewhat from proper XML, eg, by not allowing anything but UTF8 and forbidding comments. Those may be fairly minor, but they'd be problems early on, meaning you can run into trouble with the wrong XML libraries/code.
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Ah, XSLT. What utterly crappy tech. Designed by no-clue cretins to be used by morons. I remember attending a talk wehre the speaker gave glowing testimony on how easily you could find things with it, but my question as to how you could find out what you missed in a search made him angry because he had no answer. Was a supposed "expert" too.
Have not looked at it again since then. Has it gotten any better?
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I remember attending a talk wehre the speaker gave glowing testimony on how easily you could find things with it
That's a bizarre use for XSLT.
What XSLT is good for is transforming one markup-based data representation to another. For example, when I wrote a lot of requirements and design documents, I created markup languages for requirements and design docs, and a set of XSLT scripts that transformed my markup languages into other representations for presentation, notably XHTML for display by a web browser (used by the engineering staff) and Docbook [docbook.org] for nice rendering into PDF (used by businesspeople and managers; t
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Nothing like some classic anti-CmdrTaco trolling. Bonus points if you also go after CoyboyNeal (CowboiKneel?).
Jabber was a nice idea (Score:4, Interesting)
It's too bad it never really took off.
I remember setting up a Jabber server for work. Our IT group, plus a handful of people outside the group, used it for internal communication for a few years. But then our tech-illiterate IT boss discovered the Microsoft chat network (whatever it was called back then), and he became enamored of some stupid animations it let you do - e.g. having an animated character lean in full screen and wave at someone - so he mandated we all switch to MS chat.
Then, of course, people stopped using chat for anything useful and spent all their time sending animations to each other. Pretty soon afterward, those of us who actually work to do started leaving our chat client open (because it was mandated) but unmonitored, hidden behind all the other open windows on our desktops.
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MS Chat (Score:2)
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It was also practically unusable outside of moderated channels because of its lack of scripting functionality.
EPIC+wctb 4ever
Re: RIP (Score:1)
Cisco has done nothing to improve it. Their software by the same name is total junk.
Golden age of Instant Messaging platforms (Score:3, Interesting)
And still people use Slack (Score:3)
Even with all of what Jabber/XMPP has done over the years, it's really sad to me that all of the mainstream seems to use proprietary solutions that actively block (at least when they get big) true interoperability with other systems. Slack, Discord, for group stuff, for instance.
I guess it takes an incredibly courageous company to develop the next big thing on open standards?
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Jabber succeeded through XMPP (Score:1)
Cisco Jabber (Score:2)
What I'd still like to know is how Cisco named their Jabber client "Jabber" and got away with it. Surely that's a trademark issue or something, right?