“Three years ago, Jeremie Miller had a brainstorm. Instant
messaging was catching on with Internet users like wildfire, but
there was just one problem. Every provider of instant messaging had
a proprietary format that it guarded jealously. Users of America
Online’s Instant Messenger couldn’t instantly communicate with
users of competing messaging from Microsoft, Yahoo, and others,
because there was no common infrastructure. (Even today, what
infrastructure exists is still tightly controlled.) Two other
events happened at almost the same time: the open source movement
gained credibility, even spreading into corporate America. And the
importance of XML started to grow because of its flexibility and
self-descriptive characteristics.”
“Then Miller had his brainstorm. He wrote one of the first XML
parsers using JavaScript.”
“Microsoft’s planned .Net notification service will merge
instant messaging with other types of messaging, including e-mail,
fax, and voice. But Miller has even bigger plans. The company he
founded, Denver-based Jabber.com and its related Jabber.org site,
has produced an open source instant messaging infrastructure of the
same name built entirely on XML, including the transport
technology. “I wanted to convert the messaging and presence formats
into a common language, and it was a natural fit for XML,” says
Miller. As far as using XML to build the transport mechanisms,
“HTTP is an excellent way of moving objects between servers [but]
is not useful for instant messaging,” Miller says.”
[ Caution: The pages on xmlmag.com do not render correctly
on Netscape 4.76 or Opera 4 beta 4 running on Linux. lt-ed.
]