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Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Mon, 29 Nov 2004
Growl vs Jabber?
[23:36] |
[computers/internet] |
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9 Comments |
Sometime last week I discovered remote growl, which looks to be really useful. I'd like to have some cron jobs on the Debian boxes that I use as servers, and have them report stuff to my PowerBook via growl.
A few days later I discovered this post on a network packet format for Growl. It was neatly juxtaposed with a rant on Jabber. Of course, I then started thinking about how what I really want isn't Growl, it's for jabber and clients, etc to shape up to the point where I could use Jabber to do much of what I'd use remote growl for. Sure, under some circumstances I'd prefer that my traffic not go through a public XMPP server, but I could always run one inside the firewall for that slice of my traffic. There's even a command line tool, sendxmpp, that would be the perfect basis for doing this from cron/scripts/etc. The problem is that there isn't a client in sight that can do some of the cool stuff that Joe mentioned to me. Having the best, most capable protocol is irrelevant if you don't actually have good software that implements it.
At least the Adium boys are increasing their Jabber support, particularly group chats. Selective presence sure would be nice.
It's true that not all Jabber clients support all the protocols we've defined. In fact, it's safe to say that no client supports them all. The solution is for more people to contribute code patches, docs, translations, bug reports, feature requests, and the like for the clients that are close to complete (Exodus, Psi, and Gaim come to mind). Yes, this is open-source, and the vast majority of Jabber clients are created by volunteers who are not getting paid a dime to work on their projects. Another option is for organizations with money to develop kick-ass Jabber clients that do it all -- perhaps OSAF would like to add IM support to Chandler or the Mozilla Foundation would like to help out the Jabberzilla team? And naturally if you have ideas for making better Jabber clients a reality, feel free to send them along!
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Tue Nov 30 08:54:53 2004
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Tue Nov 30 08:54:53 2004
It's true that not all Jabber clients support all the protocols we've defined. In fact, it's safe to say that no client supports them all. The solution is for more people to contribute code patches, docs, translations, bug reports, feature requests, and the like for the clients that are close to complete (Exodus, Psi, and Gaim come to mind). Yes, this is open-source, and the vast majority of Jabber clients are created by volunteers who are not getting paid a dime to work on their projects. Another option is for organizations with money to develop kick-ass Jabber clients that do it all -- perhaps OSAF would like to add IM support to Chandler or the Mozilla Foundation would like to help out the Jabberzilla team? And naturally if you have ideas for making better Jabber clients a reality, feel free to send them along!
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Tue Nov 30 09:59:42 2004
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Tue Nov 30 09:59:42 2004
Hey, just curious what you feel growl can do that jabber cannot (even in it's current form)
Posted by Darryl at Tue Nov 30 19:54:07 2004
Posted by Darryl at Tue Nov 30 19:54:07 2004
It's funny seeing this come full circle. In the late eighties I worked on MIT Project Athena's Notification Service, called Zephyr. Not only did the term "instant messaging" come rather later, that aspect of it was not part of the design - Zephyr was originally implemented to notify users of specialized system-related things. After all, in a complex distributed system, how do you figure out who cares about what components? In this case, the answer was a subscription triple, and when you engaged a service you also "subscribed" to messages for that instance of the service (for example, the fileserver name or the printer name, tied to a category.) Then a fileserver outage would be announced to the subscription, and go to the right people. Likewise, you had individual messages (so you could get notified when your print job was done.) There was an initial pop-up-window client, and other more text-oriented ones later. Since the initial client had a scripting language and stylesheet system, all later ones have as well. In the early nineties, instant messaging "bloomed" out of this - people could send personal messages with it, and "chat" channels happened as a side effect of the existence of subscriptions and some generous ACLs. (Oh yes, it had ACLs and kerberos-based authentication from day one.)
So when I first saw Growl, I thought "just like windowgrams" and used the python library to toss messages to it from my existing client. Don't know how well it works, Growl wedged my windowserver, I determined that it was reproduceable, reported it, and never fired it up again...
When I look at jabber/xmpp, I don't compare it to AIM or MSN because I don't use those. I compare it to zephyr, and it comes up short - on authentication, on inter-server communication, on endpoint naming (I want messages to come to my identity, not an instance of a client, even AIM is supposed to have fixed this...) I've had a hard time explaining this to people who come from big-server-IM systems (I had a hard time at IETF IMPP meetings, and didn't have time to try with the later XMPP effort) and none of the zephyr users or admins I've talked to see jabber as a credible replacement for what we do with zephyr, even if it becomes a competitor to what people do with AIM. This is, as you can probably tell, frustrating... Zephyr has it's share of problems, and it would be nice to be able to move along with the mainstream, it just seems to have missed so much that seems obvious.
Sorry for getting quite so far off on a tangent, there... the point is that yes, system notifications are what this kind of thing is really good for, and we've known that for 15 years :-)
Posted by Mark Eichin at Tue Nov 30 22:33:56 2004
So when I first saw Growl, I thought "just like windowgrams" and used the python library to toss messages to it from my existing client. Don't know how well it works, Growl wedged my windowserver, I determined that it was reproduceable, reported it, and never fired it up again...
When I look at jabber/xmpp, I don't compare it to AIM or MSN because I don't use those. I compare it to zephyr, and it comes up short - on authentication, on inter-server communication, on endpoint naming (I want messages to come to my identity, not an instance of a client, even AIM is supposed to have fixed this...) I've had a hard time explaining this to people who come from big-server-IM systems (I had a hard time at IETF IMPP meetings, and didn't have time to try with the later XMPP effort) and none of the zephyr users or admins I've talked to see jabber as a credible replacement for what we do with zephyr, even if it becomes a competitor to what people do with AIM. This is, as you can probably tell, frustrating... Zephyr has it's share of problems, and it would be nice to be able to move along with the mainstream, it just seems to have missed so much that seems obvious.
Sorry for getting quite so far off on a tangent, there... the point is that yes, system notifications are what this kind of thing is really good for, and we've known that for 15 years :-)
Posted by Mark Eichin at Tue Nov 30 22:33:56 2004
Peter,
Is there a score card of what clients implement which features? (And a description of what those features would be good for?) That might help clients that are almost complete attract additional help. It would also help users figure out what client to get. When Lisa and Joe got me to try Jabber again, I downloaded at least 3 clients. Fortunately, I had them (XMPP wizards) right there to tell me what should work how, but for people that want to pick up a jabber client out of the box, it's a mess.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Nov 30 23:24:00 2004
Is there a score card of what clients implement which features? (And a description of what those features would be good for?) That might help clients that are almost complete attract additional help. It would also help users figure out what client to get. When Lisa and Joe got me to try Jabber again, I downloaded at least 3 clients. Fortunately, I had them (XMPP wizards) right there to tell me what should work how, but for people that want to pick up a jabber client out of the box, it's a mess.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Nov 30 23:24:00 2004
Darryl,
It can't put up growl style notifcations that pop up and then fade/go away. At least I've never seen a client that would let me specify a "subchannel" of my jabber id that was for notifications and have those notifications be rendered a different way.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Nov 30 23:25:53 2004
It can't put up growl style notifcations that pop up and then fade/go away. At least I've never seen a client that would let me specify a "subchannel" of my jabber id that was for notifications and have those notifications be rendered a different way.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Nov 30 23:25:53 2004
Peter Millard (developer of the Exodus client, one of the most advanced Jabber clients around) has posted some comments on the Growl and Zephyr threads here: http://www.pgmillard.com/blog/index.php?p=32
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Wed Dec 1 09:53:00 2004
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Wed Dec 1 09:53:00 2004
Now, to answer your other questions (Peter does a good job of addressing Mark's misconceptions about Jabber/XMPP). There is a short list of recommended clients at http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.php but not a full feature matrix. The feature matrix would need to be fairly large -- see the feature matrix we use for servers at http://www.jabber.org/software/serverdetail.php?projectID=2 and so on -- and it is a lot of work to gather that level of information for the dozens of Jabber clients in existence. However, I will make that a priority for early 2005. Yes, it would be nice to have one client that does 1-to-1, groupchat, system alerts (that's really a jabber message of type 'headline', but you need to be able to manage the alert sources and it would be best to do that with pubsub, which is just starting to mature), voice, and video. Most advanced Jabber clients do the first three, plus file transfer. Voice and video have not been tackled yet because they're not exactly straightforward and (see previous comment) these clients are all open-source. Feel free to request features and submit bugs for your Jabber clients of choice, however. Developers appreciate that rather than vague complaints that "Jabber sucks compared to Zephyr or Growl".
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Wed Dec 1 10:05:43 2004
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at Wed Dec 1 10:05:43 2004
Zephyr was some of the ugliest code to come out of Project Athena. I spent a couple weeks inside it trying to de-MIT-ize it to run standalone on ULTRIX - it looked like it was coded by chimpanzees on acid that had learned to program in APL. I'm sure it's probably cleaner code than some of the other stuff that found its way into production - but that's more of an indictment of the industry than an excuse.
mjr.
Posted by Marcus J. Ranum at Wed Sep 7 11:28:48 2005
mjr.
Posted by Marcus J. Ranum at Wed Sep 7 11:28:48 2005
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