KDE Jabber Library

[Martijn Klingens]

On Saturday 03 August 2002 22:08, Justin Karneges wrote:
> Except that only Jabber is actually useful in kdelibs.  The rest are only
> useful to Kopete.  There is no room for expansion with AIM, MSN, etc.  You
> aren't going to build a services platform on top of AIM, I'm sorry.  These
> other protocols simply aren't as flexible as Jabber, and that was part of
> their design decision.

I don't see things that Jabber can do and that are useful for a KDE library, 
but that can't be done with the other protocols in Kopete. Then again, I 
don't know all of Jabber's features.

> Of course, you must understand that I am a bit biased towards Jabber.  But
> really, we need to get away from these other protocols.  I realize Kopete
> does a great service to people, by allowing them to connect to all sorts of
> networks and maintain communication with whomever.  However, I believe code
> related to these closed services should not be part of kdelibs.  KDE could
> take a stance here and promote open-standards.

Promote != force by lock-in.

> The problem is that if you take a Lowest-Common-Denominator approach to IM,
> you'll strip Jabber of everything good about it and reduce yourself to just
> chit-chat.  This is fine for Kopete, but would make inclusion into kdelibs
> much less useful.

It has never been Kopete's goal to be Lowest Common Denominator, and it will 
never be. Otherwise we can't have colour support in the messages that we send 
either, because some protocols don't support that, for example.

> But, you're right, your particular application may not be a good use case
> for Jabber.  This does not mean there is no use for Jabber, nor does it
> mean that SIMPLE could not be included into KDE.

With another libSimple? Rather use a common library that encapsulates both 
Jabber and Simple as backend.

Martijn