[Adium-devl] Bonjour Messaging Discussion

[Evan Schoenberg]

On May 16, 2007, at 9:29 PM, Alan Humpherys wrote:

> 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.
>

On the other hand, we have someone who is working on the JEP (Peter  
Saint-Andre) telling us that he is also working with the iChat team  
to help ensure that future versions of iChat are compatible.  If this  
is, in fact, the future, it makes more sense to work toward a real  
standard versus a de facto one, knowing that the de facto is one an  
evaporating target.  Adium does have a significant 'market share' in  
the OS X world, particularly amongst those most likely to make their  
opinions known to Apple.  I think we should come down, if feasible,  
on the side of the standard.

Perhaps before we beat this horse senseless it would be worthwhile to  
know in what ways -- and how significantly -- the 'iChat standard' is  
incompatible with the proposed JEP.  Does anyone have anything  
definite on that?  All I know is from my previous experiments of a  
month or so ago, that iChat Bonjour contacts will accept  
syntactically appropriate XMPP messages without complaint and will  
reply with an error for those iChat does not understand, which  
includes capabilities discovery in general so far as I could tell.   
If, then, the overall structure of messaging is the same and the  
publishing of presence is the same (I noted in the JEP that it  
appeared to match how I'd seen libezv implement it), we've got a  
pretty compatible situation from the get-go.

-Evan 
  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20070516/be24b246/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://adium.im/pipermail/devel_adium.im/attachments/20070516/be24b246/attachment.sig>