ralphm.net

ralphm's blog

Friday, 23 December 2016

Changes

Throwing everything in the MIX…

For me, Christmas and Jabber/XMPP go together. I started being involved with the Jabber community around the end of 2000. One of the first things that I built was a bot that recorded the availability presence of my online friends, and show this on a Christmas tree. Every light in the tree represents one contact, and if the user is offline, the light is darkened.As we are nearing Christmas, I put the tree up on the frontpage again, as many years before.

Over the years, the tooltips gained insight in User Moods and Tunes, first over regular Publish-Subscribe, later enhanced with the Personal Eventing Protocol. A few years later, Jingle was born, and in 2009, stpeter wrote a great specification that solidifies the relationship between Christmas and Jabber/XMPP.

Many things have changed in those 16 years. I've changed jobs quite a few times, most recently switching from the Mailgun team at Rackspace, to an exciting new job at VimpelCom as Chat Expert last April, working on Veon (more on that later). The instant messaging landscape has changed quite a bit, too. While we, unfortunately, still have a lot of different incompatible systems, a lot of progress has been made as well.

XMPP's story is long from over, and as such I am happy and honored to serve as Chair of the XMPP Standards Foundation since last month. As every year, my current focus is making another success of the XMPP Summit and our presence with the Realtime Lounge and Devroom at FOSDEM in Brussels in February. This is always the highlight of the year, with many XMPP enthousiasts, as well as our friends of the wider Realtime Communications, showing and discussing everything they are working on, ranging from protocol discussions to WebRTC and IoT applications.

Like last year, one of the topics that really excite me is the specification known as Mediated Information eXchange (MIX). MIX takes the good parts of the Multi User Chat (MUC) protocol, that has been the basis of group chat in XMPP for quite a while, redesigned on top of XMPP Publish-Subscribe. Modern commercial messaging systems, for business use (e.g. Slack and HipChat), as well as for general use (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat, Google's offerings), have tried various approaches on the ancient model of multi-part text exchange, adding multi-media and other information sources, e.g. using integrations, bots, and cards.

MIX is the community's attempt to provide a building block that goes beyond the tradional approach of a single stream of information (presence and messages) to a collection of orthogonal information streams in the same context. A room participant can select (manually or automatically by the user agent) which information streams are of interest at that time. E.g. for mobile use or with many participants, exchanging the presence information of all participants can be unneeded or even expensive (in terms of bandwidth or battery use). In MIX, presence is available as a separate stream of information that can be disabled.

Another example is Slack's integrations. You can add streams of information (Tweets, continuous integration build results, or pull requests) to any channel. However, all participants have no choice to receive the resulting messages, intermixed with discussion. The client's notification system doesn't make any distinction between the two, so you either suffer getting alerts for every build, or mute the channel and possibly miss interesting discussion. The way around it is to have separate channels for notifications and discussion, possibly muting the former.

Using MIX, however, a client can be smarter about this. It can offer the user different ways to consume these information streams. E.g. notifications on your builds could be in a side bar. Tweets can be disabled, or modeled as a ticker. And it can be different depending on which of the (concurrent) clients you are connected with. E.g. the desktop or browser-based client has more screen real-estate to show such orthogonal information streams at the same time, a mobile client might still show the discussion and notifications interleaved.

All-in-all MIX allows for much richer, multi-modal, and more scalable interactions. Some of the other improvements over MUC include persistent participation in channels (much like IRC bouncers, but integrated), better defined multi-device use (including individual addressing), reconnection, and message archiving. I expect the discussions at the XMPP Summit to tie the loose ends as a prelude to initial implementations.

I am sure that FOSDEM and the XMPP Summit will have many more exciting topics, so I hope to see you there. Until then, Jabber on!