[Adium-devl] Bonjour Messaging Discussion

[Alan Humpherys]

On May 16, 2007, at 10:27 AM, Evan Schoenberg wrote:

>
> On May 16, 2007, at 12:12 PM, Chris Forsythe wrote:
>
>> Erich Kreutzer wrote:
>>
>>> What is the goal of Bonjour messaging support in Adium?  In
>>> other words is it more important for Adium to work well with iChat
>>> and only passably support other Bonjour messaging clients (Pidgin  
>>> and
>>> Gajim) or vice versa?
>>>
>>
>> I'd say support for iChat is more important.
>
> No acceptable implementation in any client should be incompatible  
> with the current version of iChat.  However, as we are an open  
> source messaging application, I believe that properly implementing  
> the JEP for Bonjour messaging should be the standard.  I'll be  
> surprised if there are unavoidable incompatibilities between  
> implementing that JEP and being iChat compatible in a real sense.

This is one of those questions of supporting an emerging standard vs  
a de-facto standard.

In the commercial world, it is usually the winning proposition to go  
with the de-facto standard rather than the one proposed by the  
standards body....

(A perfect example of this is delivering a website which only  
supports w3c compatible browsers...  Which would exclude IE.  That  
would be less than inteligent...  Same situation here)

If we deliver a solution that is not compatible with iChat, that will  
be a big mistake.  iChat is the standard, and JEP compatibility,  
while noble, will not win us "brownie points" with the user community  
because in their eyes, we deliver a solution that is "broken" because  
it does not work with the true Rendezvous client, which is iChat.

Ultimately, the fun and interesting challenge is to detect the client  
on the other end of the conversation and speak the language that that  
client understands...  In other words, implement both...

Since time is limited, I would advise starting with an iChat 3.1  
compatible implementation, and gradually expand that support to  
include older versions of iChat as well as implementations which are  
compatible with the JEP.

Alan
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