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A Brief History of XMPP

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The focus on small, structured bits of data gives the XMPP protocol extremely low latency and

makes it extremely useful for real-time applications. These applications, which include collaborative

spaces, games, and synchronization, are driving XMPP’s growth in popularity as developers experi-

ment with the real-time Web.

You will see how easy it is to make real-time web applications through this book’s examples. By the

end of the book you should have a thorough understanding of why so many people are excited about

XMPP’s power and promise.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF XMPP

The XMPP protocol is now more than 10 years old, and it has come a long way from its humble begin-

nings. Much of XMPP’s design is due to the environment in which XMPP was created, and the history

of XMPP provides an interesting case study in how open protocols foster adoption and innovation.

In 1996, Mirabilis released ICQ, which popularized rapid, personal communication among Internet

users. Its use spread rapidly, and before long other companies were releasing similar products. In

1997, AOL launched AOL Instant Messenger. Yahoo followed suit in 1998 with Yahoo Pager (even-

tually renamed Yahoo Messenger), and in 1999 Microsoft ﬁnally joined the competition with MSN

Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger).

Each of these instant messaging applications was tied to a proprietary protocol and network run

by the companies that made them. Users of ICQ could not talk to Yahoo users and vice versa. It

became common for users to run more than one of these applications to be able to talk to all of their

contacts because no single vendor claimed 100% market share.

It didn’t take long before developers desired to write their own clients for these proprietary IM net-

works. Some wished to make multiprotocol clients that could unite two or more of the IM networks,

and others wanted to bring these applications to operating systems other than Microsoft Windows

and Apple’s Mac OS. These developers ran into many roadblocks; they had to reverse-engineer

undocumented protocols, and the IM networks aggressively changed the protocol to thwart third-

party developers.

It was in this climate that the idea for an open, decentralized IM network and protocol was born.

Jeremie Miller announced the Jabber project in January of 1999. Jabber was a decentralized instant

messaging protocol based on XML and a server implementation called jabberd. A community

immediately formed around the protocol and implementations spawning more clients and more

ideas. By May of 2000, the core protocols were stabilized and jabberd reached a production release.

The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) was founded in 2001 to coordinate the efforts around the

Jabber protocol and its implementations. By late 2002, the JSF had submitted the core protocol spec-

iﬁcations to the IETF process, and an IETF working group was formed. In October 2004, this stan-

dards process produced improved versions of the Jabber protocols, renamed XMPP, documented as

RFCs 3920, 3921, 3922, and 3923.

During the protocol’s early life, developers continued to expand its possibilities by submitting

protocol extensions to the JSF. These extensions were called Jabber Extension Proposals (JEPs).

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