Jabber's JINGLE comes out of the closet in time for the holidays
Sorry, couldn't resist the Christmas themed title. What am I talking about? Well, the JINGLE press release* came out yesterday, announcing the official Jabber Extensions Protocols (JEPs) for doing multimedia over Jabber, or XMPP as the IETF approved protocol is officially known.
Here's the part where we learn that this is in reality a way for everyone to plug into Google Talk:
The Jingle technology represents an open version of the protocols used in the popular Google Talk application released in August 2005, and Google is supporting the standardization and evolution of these protocols through the JSF's community standards process.
The two JEPs cover signalling and the specific format for audio sessions. There is running code for interoperability with Asterisk's IAX protocol, and SIP and H.323 is in the works.
I've long turned up my nose at the primarily telco driven (with the notable exception of Microsoft) SIMPLE spec, an attempt to add presence and text messaging to SIP. Now XMPP has turned the tables, and gone after SIP. Well, actually, I don't believe that SIP will go away -- it has emerged as the core way to ship VoIP around networks -- but I think we can close the lid on SIMPLE.
What else is going on? Well, let's look at some related happenings. Kedrosky reports that Meebo, a web-based IM system, got some major money. Tim Bray points to Adium, a multi-platform IM client for OS X, as an example of what a great application looks like. Oh, right, Adium is based around the Gaim library, which brings us full circle, since the name of that library is on the press release from Jabber.
What's next? Well, for me, I'm flying to Missoula, Montana, where some of us are going to try and figure out what this all means, and what we're going to put together. Identity, presence, guaranteed delivery, security, voice...there are a bunch of applications of this technology waiting out there, we're going to take a crack at figuring out what's right.
* no RSS for the press section? Come on guys, get a real content management system.
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New Jingle Library
On a related note, I started from scratch and coded a brand new jingle singnalling library in C that I use in my OSS soft switch FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org The library called libDingaLing is included in the FreeSWITCH code base and is documented at http://www.freeswitch.org/dingaling_docs/
Jingling
A point of clarity: SIP is not the way to ship VoIP around open networks, it is a way to negotiate how you are going to ship VoIP data around open networks. The heavy lifting of most VoIP systems is done by Realtime Transport Protocol (RTP), and SIP is used only to do the call setup, management, and teardown. So Jingle is quite equivalent to SIP in that regard -- it is used to do the signalling or call management whereas the data gets sent out of band (both SIP and Jingle can be seen as ways to negotiate your way to RTP).
As to the lack of a dedicated RSS feed for JSF press releases, we have RSS and Atom feeds for all news items, so use that. :P It's located at http://www.jabber.org/news/
--stpeter
Thanks
Good clarification on the exact role of SIP, Peter -- I just wanted to indicate that it was the current majority protocol in use, but you're absolutely right: the session negotation piece of JINGLE can also do the same thing.
I *swear* those feeds weren't there when I looked...are they new? Either that, or I scrolled right past the buttons at the top: you might want to include them at the bottom as well. Subscribed, obviously :P