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by falcolas 3221 days ago
Companies giving up on open standards in favor of their own walled gardens does not really provide a meaningful commentary on the open standards themselves.

XMPP itself is a bit of a mess, but it's a standard with a lot of adoption, which has its own value.
1 comments
quanticle 3221 days ago
A lot of adoption? How many users does XMPP have? I'm glad that XMPP is open, but as a standard, it's useless to me if none of my friends are using services that support it.
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a3_nm 3220 days ago
Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on XMPP somewhere).
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notyourwork 3220 days ago
I don't have experience with xmpp protocol but how is it better than an http or soap for example?
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SamWhited 3220 days ago
XMPP Core is a protocol at (roughly) the same level as HTTP: it provides basic semantics for sending and getting data, and you can build your own application level protocols on top of it. XMPP IM is an application level protocol built on top of it that does something specific (instant messaging). It could have been built on HTTP as well, but they were designed to work well together.

If we're comparing XMPP core to HTTP, the difference is that XMPP core is async and stateful (like instant messaging sessions) and HTTP is synchronous and stateless (great for fetching documents).

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icebraining 3220 days ago
HTTP and SOAP are generic, XMPP provides semantics for specific chat/IM related concepts like users, presence, user-to-user messages, etc.
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SamWhited 3220 days ago
I don't know how one could get a good estimate of this, but it is still very widely used. Whatsapp (with custom compression and federation disabled), HipChat Server, Cisco Jabber, Android push notifications, Google Cloud Print communications, etc. are all XMPP. But yes, for personal instant messaging Google and Facebook were the big players and they are no longer on it (at least as an interface to their clients)
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