[codr7]

I tried to write a client back in the days.

XML is always painful but XMPP brings it to another level by not playing nice with most parsers which expect complete documents, I ended up having to roll my own parser.

But perhaps the situation in XML land has improved since, I sincerely hope so for the people writing today's clients.

Professionally I've been involved in one project that used XMPP as a data protocol between back end services. It was eventually phased out in favor of REST because of buggy libraries which meant capturing messages in queues and replaying whenever the thing fell over.