“Jabber is an Open Source instant messaging system which I feel
is very important for the entire community. I do not say that it is
vital for the entire community, but if it is successful, I believe
it will help improve the general public’s impression of Open
Source.”
“The core idea behind Jabber is to have an instant messaging
protocol which is extensible enough to work with many other IM
protocols transparently. Two years ago, XML quickly entered Jeremie
Miller’s mind as an easy way to achieve this. One kuro5hin user
asked how this fits into JWZ’s ideas for unity of interface, and
when looked at this way, Jabber clearly unifies all of the
protocols it supports under a single protocol, so to clients, every
protocol (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and even IRC) is exactly the
same.”
“How does Jabber do this? Jabber, like all major internet
services (smtp, http, etc.) is not bound to a single server. Anyone
can run a server, and all of the servers can talk to one another. A
JabberID consists of user@server, just like email. The major
insight Jeremie had was that all translation between protocols
should be done by the server, instead of other multiple protocol
solutions, which rely upon the client to do everything. This way, a
client just has to support Jabber and the ability to register with
other protocols.”