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PLEASE Let us do all this with something other than XMPP. Have we not learnt by now that the claim of ultimate 'extensibility'!!! Is stupidity. Most buzz words

by axod 17y ago

PLEASE Let us do all this with something other than XMPP. Have we not learnt by now that the claim of ultimate 'extensibility'!!! Is stupidity. Most buzz words starting with 'X' from the 90s early 00s should be firmly laid to rest as terrible ideas built on more terrible ideas.

riffic 17y ago
Do you have any specific faults with xmpp or is this rant based purely on speculation?
- jerf 17y ago
  I've worked a lot with XMPP in a professional capacity and I have no idea what his complaint on that front it. It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town. If you don't, you have to coordinate on the protocol, but XMPP won't get in your way. You can't do that with any other IM protocol that I know. (Which isn't all of them, but I do know a lot about a lot of them.) There are other criticisms that make more sense, mostly to do with the annoyance of dealing with XML (especially for people that don't actually understand it; there's a bit more than meets the eye and XMPP actually uses thing like namespaces) and some valid complaints about verbosity (which mostly only matters in a mobile context), but there's a lot of other "standard" criticism that come more from ignorance than understanding, the biggest one being "complexity"; XMPP is modular, and if you just want to pop open a connection and send a message that's hardly a day's worth of coding starting from nothing more than a socket and an XML parser. If you don't want to be in a conference room, you don't have to worry about the conferencing standard, and so on. There pretty much isn't another IM protocol that's even in the running for this sort of use, because XMPP is the only one that actually is extensible. The only alternative is specifying a protocol from scratch, and of course that hypothetical protocol is perfect and awesome... what with it not existing. Of course XMPP can't compete with the perfect protocols that exist only in people's imaginations (and note the plural... no two of them are the same). But XMPP actually exists, now.
  - axod 17y ago
    >> " It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town." So what's the point of using xmpp at all? Why not just use a specific protocol geared to your use case? Using your own simple protocol is also trivially extensible. And human readable. Writing a parser for a json like syntax is also trivial - contrast this with an xml parser which is not trivial.
    - jerf 17y ago
      Go ahead and try it, and you'll find out why. Why not use a better protocol to send email? Why are we still using HTTP to send web traffic, even though we've really gotten beyond what it is good at? Why am I FTP-ing a file even as we speak? You're basically asking why utopia doesn't exist. You won't like the answers, so I'm not going to bother with them. All I can say is: Try it. See how far you get. I'm not kidding. This isn't just a rhetorical device. Go out and try to define your own protocol. See how many people rush over to join in. Maybe you'll pull off an Atom, but the odds are long. (In fact, I do use my own protocol when I control both endpoints, even in a use case that looks a lot like XMPP, and in fact it is JSON based. The project I am working on right now has that as its backbone. But I know the limits of that approach. Bear that in mind as you try to understand where I'm coming from.)
      - axod 17y ago
        Those protocols took off (HTTP/Email/etc). The network effect came into play. XMPP never really took off (Big surprise). Using it for new, unconnected systems, is idiocy IMHO. There are probably more XMPP extension specifications than there are people using XMPP. I agree, launching new protocols is hard. You need leverage and a network effect to get it going. I do get where you're coming from. I just think that anyone who has the choice on what protocol to use for something, and picks XMPP, is mad. Even if it has to interface to legacy systems they could use a bridge.
        riffic 17y ago
        xmpp seems to have taken off pretty decently from what i've seen so far (rfc process, ietf backing, adoption by google et al)
- axod 17y ago
  Yes I've written most of an XMPP client from scratch. It's a disgusting wart of a protocol over engineered by insane people. My previous comment on the matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 Extensibility is really trivial. Human readable is trivial. Protocols based on XML solve neither of these well at all IMHO. If XMPP ever did take off, we'd see a large increase in bandwidth usage everywhere. No doubt though they'd then just wrap it all up in another layer of complex compression to compensate for a ridiculous protocol.

by axod 17y ago

riffic 17y ago

Do you have any specific faults with xmpp or is this rant based purely on speculation?

jerf 17y ago
I've worked a lot with XMPP in a professional capacity and I have no idea what his complaint on that front it. It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town. If you don't, you have to coordinate on the protocol, but XMPP won't get in your way. You can't do that with any other IM protocol that I know. (Which isn't all of them, but I do know a lot about a lot of them.) There are other criticisms that make more sense, mostly to do with the annoyance of dealing with XML (especially for people that don't actually understand it; there's a bit more than meets the eye and XMPP actually uses thing like namespaces) and some valid complaints about verbosity (which mostly only matters in a mobile context), but there's a lot of other "standard" criticism that come more from ignorance than understanding, the biggest one being "complexity"; XMPP is modular, and if you just want to pop open a connection and send a message that's hardly a day's worth of coding starting from nothing more than a socket and an XML parser. If you don't want to be in a conference room, you don't have to worry about the conferencing standard, and so on. There pretty much isn't another IM protocol that's even in the running for this sort of use, because XMPP is the only one that actually is extensible. The only alternative is specifying a protocol from scratch, and of course that hypothetical protocol is perfect and awesome... what with it not existing. Of course XMPP can't compete with the perfect protocols that exist only in people's imaginations (and note the plural... no two of them are the same). But XMPP actually exists, now.
- axod 17y ago
  >> " It's trivially extensible; if you control both ends of the connection, grab a namespace and go to town." So what's the point of using xmpp at all? Why not just use a specific protocol geared to your use case? Using your own simple protocol is also trivially extensible. And human readable. Writing a parser for a json like syntax is also trivial - contrast this with an xml parser which is not trivial.
  - jerf 17y ago
    Go ahead and try it, and you'll find out why. Why not use a better protocol to send email? Why are we still using HTTP to send web traffic, even though we've really gotten beyond what it is good at? Why am I FTP-ing a file even as we speak? You're basically asking why utopia doesn't exist. You won't like the answers, so I'm not going to bother with them. All I can say is: Try it. See how far you get. I'm not kidding. This isn't just a rhetorical device. Go out and try to define your own protocol. See how many people rush over to join in. Maybe you'll pull off an Atom, but the odds are long. (In fact, I do use my own protocol when I control both endpoints, even in a use case that looks a lot like XMPP, and in fact it is JSON based. The project I am working on right now has that as its backbone. But I know the limits of that approach. Bear that in mind as you try to understand where I'm coming from.)
    - axod 17y ago
      Those protocols took off (HTTP/Email/etc). The network effect came into play. XMPP never really took off (Big surprise). Using it for new, unconnected systems, is idiocy IMHO. There are probably more XMPP extension specifications than there are people using XMPP. I agree, launching new protocols is hard. You need leverage and a network effect to get it going. I do get where you're coming from. I just think that anyone who has the choice on what protocol to use for something, and picks XMPP, is mad. Even if it has to interface to legacy systems they could use a bridge.
      - riffic 17y ago
        xmpp seems to have taken off pretty decently from what i've seen so far (rfc process, ietf backing, adoption by google et al)
axod 17y ago
Yes I've written most of an XMPP client from scratch. It's a disgusting wart of a protocol over engineered by insane people. My previous comment on the matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=426581 Extensibility is really trivial. Human readable is trivial. Protocols based on XML solve neither of these well at all IMHO. If XMPP ever did take off, we'd see a large increase in bandwidth usage everywhere. No doubt though they'd then just wrap it all up in another layer of complex compression to compensate for a ridiculous protocol.