[Freeciv-Dev] Poll on Jabber

[Adam Theo <theo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, all. I've been on the list a bit promoting the Jabber instant 
messaging protocol [http://www.jabber.org] for use in FreeCiv as its 
chat system. Jabber has many advantages over even the current 
home-brewed solution, all of which I summarize below. The thread should 
have garnered enough eyeballs by now to give some awareness of Jabber 
and how it can help, so I'm now going to run a quick poll on whether you 
think Jabber should be adopted for the chat functionality of FreeCiv. A 
simple yes or no is good, but also feel free to include your own 
comments, questions, or conditions. Also, I think we can reply to the 
list, since I can't imagine the traffic from this will be large and it 
would help keep everyone else in the loop.
If great interest was shown in using Jabber, I'm pretty sure I could get 
a couple of C programmers from the Jabber community to help impliment it 
on the server side. It should then be trivial to impliment it in the 
client. I would also gladly do the developer and user documentation for 
it when it became a reality.
For a good introduction to Jabber, you can take a quick look at the 
short introduction I have composed for situations like this 
[http://www.theoretic.com/?Jabber_Education_Document]. You can also find 
the Jabber Technology Overview 
[http://docs.jabber.org/general/html/overview.html] and the Programmer's 
Guide [http://docs.jabber.org/jpg/html/main.html]. All of this and more 
can be reached from the Jabber Documentation site 
[http://www.jabber.org/docs].
Jabber could provide many good benefits, including:
* Better future-proofing. Jabber is designed with modularity in mind. 
Enhancements and extensions can be added to the base protocol trivially.
* Presence for users and servers. Jabber began as an IM platform, so has 
support for presence and status of users, servers, and other entities. 
Users could set themselves as away or busy during games, and servers 
could tell players that someone dropped their connection using a formal 
presence mechanism.
* Middleware. Jabber is a very clean and flexible protocol, and 
therefore is easily used as a middleware transport between different 
systems that normally could not communicate with each other. Using 
Jabber, you could eaily interoperate with MSN Messenger or IRC (AIM and 
ICQ, as well, but AOL is actively hostile towards interoperability), 
other IM systems, or other games that don't even have to be 
Jabber-enabled. Jabber can convert thedata format native to each one and 
translate between the two.
* Standard emoticons. Soon (spearheaded by myself) Jabber will have an 
extensible, customizable mechanism for emoticons (smileys and frownies) 
and genicons (beer mugs, moons, etc). FreeCiv could define it's own 
genicons (such as tanks, flags, and white doves) to be used in chats. 
For more information see 
http://wwwtheoretic.com/?Emoticons_And_Genicons/Simple_Plaintext
* Directory services. Jabber currently has a simple directory and 
discovery mechanism called JUD. It would suffice for most uses and could 
be easily advanced to keep track of different FreeCiv servers, frequent 
players, and online help bots.
* Different modes of chat. Jabber has support for single email-like 
messages like ICQ, chat messages like AIM, and of course groupchat like 
IRC. FreeCiv would probably most benefit from the groupchat.
* Jabber can be artifically intelligent. Because Jabber allows for a 
wide variety of entities on the network, AI users can be easily created 
for any purpose. The popular jdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx chatroom has the 
beloved ChatBot which logs conversations, speaks join messages, and 
spits out glossary terms when asked. There are others that know the 
weather, current stock quotes, do google searches, and translate between 
english and other languages.
* Mostly GPL. Most Jabber implimentations (the most popular server, most 
clients and many developer tools) are covered by the GPL. The Jabber 
protocol itself is not because it is a protocol. Protocols cannot be 
copyrighted. Jabber however is free (as in freedom) and open *just* like 
SMTP (email) and HTTP (web). Check out the JOSS (also known as 
"JabberD") [http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org].
Please reply, expressing your thoughts on using Jabber. Vote on the poll 
so I know how hard I have to work still to convince everyone Jabber is 
perfect for FreeCiv :-) And as I said above, I'm pretty sure I could get 
a bit of help for FreeCiv and I'd gladly do the documentation.
--
    /\  Adam Theo, Age 23, Tallahassee FL USA
   //\\   Email & Jabber: theo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  //  \\  (Boycotting AOL, therefore no AIM or ICQ)
=//====\\=  Theoretic Solutions: http://www.theoretic.com
//  ||  \\     "Bringing Ideas Together"
    ||      Jabber Protocol: http://www.jabber.org
    ||         "The Coolest IM on the Planet"
    ||  "A Free-Market Socialist Patriotic American
    ||      Buddhist Political Philosopher."