Comments on: XMPP: powering the real-time, really live web

By: dahuang

dahuang — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:07:56 +0000

http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/macvittie/archive/2009/06/02/facepalm-google-wave-choice-of-xmpp-not-the-death-of.aspx

“About XMPP usage in Google Wave–it’s for server-to-server communication, while HTTP is still fully employed for the usual server-to-client communication.”

So does these arguments and examples in that article mean in the case of Google Wave, *real-time* between the client and server is still guaranteed by XMLHttpRequest, not XMPP? Do you agree with him?

By: Marcus Povey

Marcus Povey — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:14:50 +0000

@stpeter I kinda figured someone would have thought of this already

By: Ravikant

Ravikant — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 20:41:44 +0000

Nice article Ben. XMPP has its overheads and a few downsides but overall its a very elegant protocol that can be built upon. There are a large set of XEPs that extend it. I love the hemlock idea. XMPP is designed to be easy on the client and complex on the server. But for widespread use, it needs to be super easy like HTTP and also it needs tool support.

By: stpeter

stpeter — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:39:20 +0000

@Marcus XMPP already does include compression, in two flavors: compression at the transport layer via Transport Layer Security (TLS) and compression at the XMPP application layer using zlib or other methods via Stream Compression (see XEP-0138).

By: peter

peter — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:34:44 +0000

nice words. liked to read it. In my oppinion xmpp is missing a real flagship of instant messaging service or product. who uses GTalk today?

two years ago I started to get into xmpp topic and put all my hope into Jive Software with the Openfire (formerly Wildfire) Server. Great product but today the project stands still. http://www.igniterealtime.org

Now I hope the best for Google Wave although I am not the biggest fan of Google. But if Google’s “Wave” becomes succesful I think nobody will know about xmpp better than today. In the demo from Google there was no talk about xmpp at all. It’s Google’s Protocol.

Let’s hope there will be a quick improvement. We currently use Openfire in bussines but without further updates an bugfixes there will be no chance of keeping it online.

cheers

By: Marcus Povey

Marcus Povey — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:53:20 +0000

The big problem with XMPP for me is that for lots of small messages going to different places (the typical usecase) the overhead is rather high.

That’s not to say it’s not cool, but it is a little bit of a problem if you’re talking widespread deployment and scaling.

I’m wondering if – given that CPU is cheap compared to bandwidth – some sort of symmetric mod_deflate could be a simple solution (if that hasn’t been done already), although that would require decompression of all packets that need to be analysed which may have its own inefficiencies.

How much of this is actually a problem given the current bandwidth explosion remains to be seen, but spare a thought for those in places like Russia and the far east (or on mobile platforms) who are paying for connectivity per megabyte.

By: Kevin Jardine

Kevin Jardine — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:56:16 +0000

Ben, you are right on about XMPP being a key tool for future Internet apps. More and more social networks are going to start combining mobile phones, websites and real time interfaces like Skype.

I’ve been experimenting with it on and off for years (ever since Google Talk was introduced at least and probably before). The main problem has been convincing clients that they should look at something beyond a bog standard website.

I hope that Wave will be more successful in sparking the long delayed XMPP revolution than jabber (or Google Talk) has been.