One of the best things that could happen today I think is Google open sourcing the Hangouts protocol. It's a reasonable alternative to XMPP and has a massive userbase. The clients are pretty horrible but that might be completely unrelated to how good the protocol is (Note: I have no idea how good it is. Because it's closed source.).
I was hopeful for a while but I don't really see it happening anymore :( Oh well...
Edit: Oh and the worst part: Communication is just one side of that coin. The other side is identity and it's one hell of a side. OpenID was a disaster. Mozilla got it mostly right with Persona but completely botched the marketing and has all but given up on it now. There is no decent foss protocol for identity/authentication today other than Persona, and nobody is working on one. There was a time indeed where I could've pictured Google working on solving this just for the hell of it. Just because it would improve the world. That Google is gone, and there's nobody with the appropriate reach that seems willing to do it now.
Persona was great and it's a bit sad to see it dead after investing a lot of time in it but - one big architectural problem was there was no way to support delegation (the problem OAuth was originally designed to solve).
Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way.
> Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323?
I've worked with all three. The H.323 vs SIP battle was fought a long time ago... for better or worse, SIP won. Any H.323 systems still in the wild can probably be considered "legacy."
That being said, while H.323 has more "batteries included," its call flow is accordingly more complex. SIP is not too bad, there is some subtlety to it, but the main issue is that you have to piece together dozens of RFCs for an interoperable system, not to speak of implementation-specific quirks.
XMPP is the more appropriate protocol in this context -- IM and group chat -- because it has had presence and ad-hoc messaging baked in from the start, including reasonably supported MUC. Ultimately, XMPP's issues are similar to SIP's -- the patchwork of XEPs is too unwieldy to work with. For an example, compare the multimedia bits (eg, Jingle) and the corresponding SIP session setup flow. The stigma of being a XML-based protocol designed in the 90's doesn't help, either.
The biggest reason SIP is sticking around, however, is that it has major buy-in from the telcos with IMS/4G. However, SIP is also a more appropriate protocol for traditional telephony. In that respect, comparing SIP and XMPP is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. With the appropriate extensions, one could behave like the other, but it wouldn't be their strength.
I was the editor of the H.323 spec years ago. Funny you would say that SIP looks like it comes from the telcos, when the whole aim with SIP was to create just the opposite. H.323 has often been accused of being created by telcos, too. Truth is, folks from the traditional enterprise voice equipment makers shaped both.
SIP was adopted by 3GPP in 1999 to be used in the mobile networks. Of course, that trickled throughout the telcos, so it now is widely used in the telco space. H.323 was widely used for PSTN backhauling to reduce tolls. However, SIP is more prevalent there, I'd guess.
Enterprise networks still use both H.323 and SIP, with more desk phones using SIP and videoconferencing equipment split, but moving to SIP.
That said, any move to SIP these days is only because there is nothing better. WebRTC is the next big thing. It borrows SDP from SIP, but no signaling protocol is defined.
Personally, I'd like to realize the vision behind what was intended to be H.325, which was to be a JSON-based signalling protocol that is fully distributed. Each application could implement whatever protocol it wanted, and they would all be associated through H.325, giving the user the feeling that these different applications work closely together. That would be possible, even when applications run on different devices.
Alas, there seems to be no financial motivator for those that control the market to explore that concept, so we're stuck with H.323, SIP, and WebRTC (and various proprietary glue pieces). The trend these days seems to be toward proprietary solutions, providing limited interop with others through SIP. Limited, as in nothing but basic voice and video.
Identity is a separate problem. So far, https://www.accountchooser.com and OpenID is winning -- if by winning you mean maintaining a list of very popular email providers and using their APIs. ;-)
Yeah, I can't see Google ever either open sourcing Hangouts, or making it possible to federate it. Google's opinion seems to be that everything that is a service or protocol should be a Google API.
I remember reading about matrix when they first announced. Was pretty excited about it, haven't heard anything since. I
It's just tech though; even if it's mind-blowingly great, won't do much good if no large-scale userbase picks it up somehow.
We're still alive and going strong - currently supporting glossy client development like Vector.im and building out bridges to as many other networks as possible (IRC, Slack, HipChat etc) using http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge and similar. In terms of being picked up by a large user base... yes, we need it if we are to be really relevant. And that means relying on folks like those commenting on this thread to try using it, contributing to it, and help us make it better.
Whilst we're not trying to replace XMPP, Matrix.org does provide an entirely different architecture (decentralised and evetually-consistent history, high baseline feature set, HTTP-based, etc) that can be used for group chat/VoIP/etc.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of the best things that could happen today I think is Google open sourcing the Hangouts protocol. It's a reasonable alternative to XMPP and has a massive userbase. The clients are pretty horrible but that might be completely unrelated to how good the protocol is (Note: I have no idea how good it is. Because it's closed source.).
I was hopeful for a while but I don't really see it happening anymore :( Oh well...
Edit: Oh and the worst part: Communication is just one side of that coin. The other side is identity and it's one hell of a side. OpenID was a disaster. Mozilla got it mostly right with Persona but completely botched the marketing and has all but given up on it now. There is no decent foss protocol for identity/authentication today other than Persona, and nobody is working on one. There was a time indeed where I could've pictured Google working on solving this just for the hell of it. Just because it would improve the world. That Google is gone, and there's nobody with the appropriate reach that seems willing to do it now.
I will forever mourn and be angered by Mozilla giving up on Persona so easily.
Why is Persona dead? Visiting the site doesn't seem to give any indication it's dead...
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Persona was great and it's a bit sad to see it dead after investing a lot of time in it but - one big architectural problem was there was no way to support delegation (the problem OAuth was originally designed to solve).
Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323? From what I've been able to figure out, H.323 looks like it's one of the better candidates of protocols that exist today and is "reasonably" simple... while SIP... well, SIP smells a lot like it came from big TelCos. And not in a good way.
See eg: https://www.packetizer.com/ipmc/h323_vs_sip/
> Has anyone got experience with both XMPP and SIP/H.323?
I've worked with all three. The H.323 vs SIP battle was fought a long time ago... for better or worse, SIP won. Any H.323 systems still in the wild can probably be considered "legacy."
That being said, while H.323 has more "batteries included," its call flow is accordingly more complex. SIP is not too bad, there is some subtlety to it, but the main issue is that you have to piece together dozens of RFCs for an interoperable system, not to speak of implementation-specific quirks.
XMPP is the more appropriate protocol in this context -- IM and group chat -- because it has had presence and ad-hoc messaging baked in from the start, including reasonably supported MUC. Ultimately, XMPP's issues are similar to SIP's -- the patchwork of XEPs is too unwieldy to work with. For an example, compare the multimedia bits (eg, Jingle) and the corresponding SIP session setup flow. The stigma of being a XML-based protocol designed in the 90's doesn't help, either.
The biggest reason SIP is sticking around, however, is that it has major buy-in from the telcos with IMS/4G. However, SIP is also a more appropriate protocol for traditional telephony. In that respect, comparing SIP and XMPP is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. With the appropriate extensions, one could behave like the other, but it wouldn't be their strength.
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I was the editor of the H.323 spec years ago. Funny you would say that SIP looks like it comes from the telcos, when the whole aim with SIP was to create just the opposite. H.323 has often been accused of being created by telcos, too. Truth is, folks from the traditional enterprise voice equipment makers shaped both.
SIP was adopted by 3GPP in 1999 to be used in the mobile networks. Of course, that trickled throughout the telcos, so it now is widely used in the telco space. H.323 was widely used for PSTN backhauling to reduce tolls. However, SIP is more prevalent there, I'd guess.
Enterprise networks still use both H.323 and SIP, with more desk phones using SIP and videoconferencing equipment split, but moving to SIP.
That said, any move to SIP these days is only because there is nothing better. WebRTC is the next big thing. It borrows SDP from SIP, but no signaling protocol is defined.
Personally, I'd like to realize the vision behind what was intended to be H.325, which was to be a JSON-based signalling protocol that is fully distributed. Each application could implement whatever protocol it wanted, and they would all be associated through H.325, giving the user the feeling that these different applications work closely together. That would be possible, even when applications run on different devices.
Alas, there seems to be no financial motivator for those that control the market to explore that concept, so we're stuck with H.323, SIP, and WebRTC (and various proprietary glue pieces). The trend these days seems to be toward proprietary solutions, providing limited interop with others through SIP. Limited, as in nothing but basic voice and video.
1 reply →
Identity is a separate problem. So far, https://www.accountchooser.com and OpenID is winning -- if by winning you mean maintaining a list of very popular email providers and using their APIs. ;-)
Yeah, I can't see Google ever either open sourcing Hangouts, or making it possible to federate it. Google's opinion seems to be that everything that is a service or protocol should be a Google API.
https://matrix.org is a promising candidate.
I remember reading about matrix when they first announced. Was pretty excited about it, haven't heard anything since. I It's just tech though; even if it's mind-blowingly great, won't do much good if no large-scale userbase picks it up somehow.
We're still alive and going strong - currently supporting glossy client development like Vector.im and building out bridges to as many other networks as possible (IRC, Slack, HipChat etc) using http://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge and similar. In terms of being picked up by a large user base... yes, we need it if we are to be really relevant. And that means relying on folks like those commenting on this thread to try using it, contributing to it, and help us make it better.
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Whilst we're not trying to replace XMPP, Matrix.org does provide an entirely different architecture (decentralised and evetually-consistent history, high baseline feature set, HTTP-based, etc) that can be used for group chat/VoIP/etc.
I don't know who will do it, but it will be in-band, meaning inside http and using html5.