3 ms·

I've been watching this situation closely, and I too am concerned about how a client/server protocol specification isn't being prioritized higher. That said, d

by pohl 17y ago

I've been watching this situation closely, and I too am concerned about how a client/server protocol specification isn't being prioritized higher. That said, does the Google Talk client in the sidebar of my GMail client speak XMPP? Of course not...it's a web app, and it needs to talk to a web server as an intermediary to a jabber server somewhere. I can log in using a desktop GUI jabber client to an actual XMPP listener if I want to, and that is what is important. I don't care one whit about the protocol that GMail Chat uses to talk to its back end. That's a private matter between Google and Google. It's not the browser-server protocol that needs to be specified, but rather some other client-server protocol, without any assumption that the client is a browser. It seems to me that the relationship between "the web" and Wave is entirely incidental, stemming from the fact that their reference client runs in a browser. One might well write a client in Cocoa or GTK, in which case an open specification for how Google's Wave client, written in GWT, communicates with its back end does us no good at all. However, I'm willing to give it time. It feels like they've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, based on this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/thread/a2de2480e4c3beeb# http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/t...

dandelany 17y ago
Thanks, that's a great link... Best message in the thread is from Anthony Baxter @Google, about halfway down the page: "When I and other googlers have said 'there's no concrete client-server protocol', you can attach an unspoken 'yet' to that. We don't know what it should look like in it's final form. On the other hand, we have a fair idea about the requirements and needs of the federation protocol, which is why we took at stab at writing that down first. "If anyone has ideas about what this should look like based on what they've seen so far, start a discussion on it. It's not necessary for Google to come down the mountain with a completed standard engraved in stone. Or even in something softer, like soap."
jacobolus 17y ago
> That said, does the Google Talk client in the sidebar of my GMail client speak XMPP? Of course not...it's a web app,[...] It doesn't, but it should. This is something we’ve been trying to address with the Orbited and JS.IO projects (links below). Building in-browser clients on a JavaScript XMPP client saves developer effort and aids interop, because each web client isn't inventing its own ad-hoc buggy mutated version of the protocol, based essentially on the same semantics, but with arbitrary changes to syntax. http://orbited.org/ http://orbited.org/ http://js.io/ http://js.io/
- pohl 17y ago
  That's a nice idea. There are other ways to skin that cat: if you have a server-side library that speaks perfect jabber, your web client can invoke it from afar. The library's API should work the same either way. Heck, if it's a Java library use GWT RPC.

by pohl 17y ago

dandelany 17y ago

Thanks, that's a great link... Best message in the thread is from Anthony Baxter @Google, about halfway down the page: "When I and other googlers have said 'there's no concrete client-server protocol', you can attach an unspoken 'yet' to that. We don't know what it should look like in it's final form. On the other hand, we have a fair idea about the requirements and needs of the federation protocol, which is why we took at stab at writing that down first. "If anyone has ideas about what this should look like based on what they've seen so far, start a discussion on it. It's not necessary for Google to come down the mountain with a completed standard engraved in stone. Or even in something softer, like soap."

jacobolus 17y ago

> That said, does the Google Talk client in the sidebar of my GMail client speak XMPP? Of course not...it's a web app,[...] It doesn't, but it should. This is something we’ve been trying to address with the Orbited and JS.IO projects (links below). Building in-browser clients on a JavaScript XMPP client saves developer effort and aids interop, because each web client isn't inventing its own ad-hoc buggy mutated version of the protocol, based essentially on the same semantics, but with arbitrary changes to syntax. http://orbited.org/ http://orbited.org/ http://js.io/ http://js.io/

pohl 17y ago
That's a nice idea. There are other ways to skin that cat: if you have a server-side library that speaks perfect jabber, your web client can invoke it from afar. The library's API should work the same either way. Heck, if it's a Java library use GWT RPC.