[Foundation] Growing Concerns for Client Developers

[Iain Shigeoka]

At 11:06 AM 10/4/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>One of the original goals of Jabber was to keep the clients simple, so
>that we could have more clients on more platforms.  Some recent trends
>in the amount of information and requirements that are being pushed on
>to the client are beginning to scare me.  Some of the ideas that are
>starting to foster in the JIGs would require clients to implement heavy
>protocol pieces and engines such as XPath and XSLT.  While both of these
>technologies are great, I feel they are better left to the server side
>of things.  Clients should only need to understand simple XML parsing,
>namespaces (although that needs to be fixed all over the place), and the
>XMLStreams protocol.  We currently have no guidelines or suggestions for
>how a JIG should form it's technology, especially with relation to
>clients.  Maybe we need an informational JEP outlining the principles of
>Jabber XML and client simplicity with regards to protocol handling?  I
>think this could greatly benefit newcomers in general and our protocol
>designers.

I agree.  At the very least, if we have Jabber "environments" we must 
provide for one that is limited enough to allow quick/small implementations 
of clients.  This should support simple implementations as plugins for 
other applications (similar to the ease of adding rudimentary email 
capability to a program) as well as resource constrained devices such as 
mobile phones, 2way pagers, etc.

Would this be best served be creating a JEP I'm not sure.  Perhaps a well 
advertised whitepaper with links to it from everyplace a developer is 
likely to go for info (docs, standards, jigs, etc) would serve better.  I 
would tentatively guess that many people will only look at the JEP's as a 
last resort (the term RTFM being evidence of that trend).  :)

>P.S. - Yes I am indirectly implying I would work on this =)

By all means...  :)

-iain


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