Re: Status of APEX?

> Hello, I've just begun poking around the BEEP/APEX sphere. APEX in 
> particular seems to be a great substrate for some technology I've been 
> thinking about for a few months. However, the current state of affairs 
> looks kind of disheartening -- there are a couple of RFCs and 
> Internet-Drafts, but apparently no real implementations; the WG home 
> page seems about two years out of date; and this mailing list is nearly 
> deserted.
> 
> Is there actually real activity going on with APEX? Is it feasible for 
> me to start designing a higher-level protocol that will use it, or will 
> I have to wait a long time (or forever) for a real working APEX 
> implementation?
> 
> I hope this doesn't sound too gloomy. APEX sounds wonderful on paper, 
> and I really hope that it's going somewhere so I can take advantage of 
> its potential.

i'll speak just for myself:

(as a co-author of apex,) i think it's got a clean design and represents a very
powerful evolution to store-and-forward semantics at the application layer.
however, about a year ago it became clear to me that the only "killer app" on
the horizon for apex was going to be instant messaging, and that field is
regrettably too cluttered to support another entry.

so, after looking around, i decided that jabber was very close to APEX
in terms of philosophy and capability. further, the amount of energy
required to:
    
    add stuff to jabber so that it could do everything apex could do
    
is much smaller than the amount of energy required to:
    
    implement/deploy apex to the level that jabber is
    
hence, you see the xmpp effort which is an attempt to get jabber into
the xmpp fold. if apex had come out 3 years earlier, or if there was no
jabber, then i'd certainly be busy working on a couple of apex
implementations.
    
having said all that, if you think apex solves something for
you, consider implementing it yourself as a part of your
application. (i'd look at jabber first, of course, since you wouldn't
have to implement that.)

i know that at least one other vendor is doing apex for internal work,
so they (or others) may something here as well...
    
/mtr