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"if someone had just jammed XMPP and SMTP together" - wasn't that kind of what Google Wave was aiming for?
by amanzi 8y ago
"if someone had just jammed XMPP and SMTP together" - wasn't that kind of what Google Wave was aiming for?
- lucideer 8y agoYes. And the vision for Google Wave was great. The execution was just abominably bad (primarily on the frontend/UI side), and Google's failures in execution carried over reputationally to the—now dead—Apache incubator.
- vidarh 8y agoNot just the UI side. The underlying protocol was also pointlessly over-engineered. SMTP is still around because it is simple. You can get a basic SMTP client running in an hour or two. You can get a basic server running in a similar amount of time, at least in a higher level language. That matters, not because anyone will have anything usable in that time, but because it lets you start to experiment very, very easily. Wave suffered from a UI that was a mess layered on top of a protocol that made it really hard for people to get started on experimenting with alternative frontends, and without a user-base giving people a reason to persist figuring out how to interoperate with it. Had the protocol been simpler, the UI mess might not have mattered so much - people might have come up with their own ideas.
- arethuza 8y agoYou don't even need a client - connecting with telnet and sending emails is pretty straightforward. I guess the modern equivalent is checking if a REST API is usable just with curl.
- sjwright 8y agoThe S in SMTP literally stands for Simple. And it was developed in 1982. So it was considered simple in 1982. That gives you some idea how simple it is. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc821
- PaulHoule 8y agoIt is simple today, except for the authentication. Of course, if the authentication doesn't work, nothing works!
- hardwaresofton 8y agoYes, but no -- I wasn't one of the Google Wave faithful so I don't know the ins and outs of it, but I what I wanted was the ability to extend SMTP all together to include the possibility of negotiating XMPP -- almost like what's happened with HTTP 1.1/2/3 evolving to support new connection types and content types/etc.
- rakoo 8y agoFurther than that, it seems to me SMTP is functionally included inside XMPP so there's no need in mixing them. Perhaps having an SMTP gateway that feeds into an XMPP server at most.