Presence and IntComm WG

[Peter Saint-Andre <>]

Will, Rodger (R.) wrote:
> PIC Participants: Please review the following wiki page to learn about 
> and comment on the proposal to create a project that will provide a 
> software stack for presence and realtime communications based on the 
> XMPP standard.  

The documents seem more SIP/SIMPLE-centric to me. A few examples:

- "discuss techniques for adding rich presence (such as calendar and 
location tracking), federation, identity and privacy capabilities, 
and/or other standards-based protocols (such as SIMPLE) when feasible"

FWIW, XMPP has native federation, many rich presence extensions, and a 
robust publish-subscribe technology for delivering those extensions as 
defined at http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html (core spec) and 
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0163.html (simplified "Personal 
Eventing Protocol" profile).

- "Presence updates via SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY for clients that don't 
implement PUBLISH"

FWIW, XMPP has only one way to do presence updates, via the <presence/> 
XML "stanza". See RFC 3921 for details.

- "Group chat, such as Message Session Relay Protocol"

FWIW, in XMPP we have a groupchat protocol called Multi-User Chat, which 
is stable (the core of it has been in use since 2000), widely 
implemented and deployed (e.g. it's the only group chat technology that 
has been approved by DISA for use in military applications), and does 
just about everything IRC does except with a stronger security model. 
See http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html for details.

> Please provide any and all comments to the list.  Thanks.
>
> _https://wiki.internet2.edu/confluence/display/picwg/pic.edu+Draft+Proposal_ 

I find the focus on commercial vendors puzzling. There is so much 
open-source code that implements XMPP and its extensions that folks here 
could quite easily put together a complete suite of server(s), clients, 
and add-on components to do everything you want. Plus you could have 
students contributing code back to the relevant projects, enabling them 
to gain experience with the open-source community and enabling your 
organizations to improve those offerings. I don't know the state of 
open-source SIP/TURN/STUN/etc. implementations as well, but I do know 
that such code exists (e.g., the OpenSER server). Why pay some 
commercial vendor when you can build this stuff for free? Not that I'm 
opposed to commercial vendors, mind you, but it seems unnecessary here 
and contrary to the spirit of experimentation that our universities 
might want to foster.

Peter

--
Peter Saint-Andre
XMPP Standards Foundation
http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/people/stpeter.shtml

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