Re: Current status of IMPP

Hi,

I am not a member of the working group but i think I can answer your
question somewhat. Others will fill in missing info or miunderstadnings I
hope.

The IMPP working group will NOT be establishing a transport level protocol
for IM.
They are only describing the semantics and data format used for interchange
between different transports. The data being exchanged will be presense info
and actual messages.
Basically it was decided that they couldn;t all agree so they decided to
just describe a compatibility interface.

There are currently 2 transports being developed independantly.

1st is SIP/SIMPLE. You can find the SIMPLE working group through the
IETF.org working groups page. This is seems to have the most industry
support including support in the current Windows Messenger product.

The other is BEEP/APEX. I think APEX has a link on the working groups page
also. If not you should be able to get to it through the beep working group
or beepcore.org.
APEX is a framework for best effort asynchronous message exchange. Work is
definitely going forward on it.

There was a 3rd. PRIM but it appears to have died.

Also, you might want to look at jabber.org. It isn't compliant to the spec
yet but they are working on it. It is a very popular open source protocol.
It has some deficiencies in the security areas defined by the IMPP drafts
though so it may eventually run over beep as well.

Lets say you were writing a SIP server to be used for IM.

An IM comes in destined for another SIP user. In this case you would do
nothing in the conversion area. Just send the SIMPLE format to the other
client without converting it to CPIM format( this of course assumes that
SIMPLE isn;t using CPIM internally which I can't say for sure. Either way
though , SIP to SIP requires no conversion).
However, if a message came in for an APEX user your server would need to
"speak" APEX also. It would establish an APEX connection to the end in
question, convert the SIMPLE message to CPIM format and send that to the
APEX user.

Basically, if the SIMPLE or APEX internal format differs from CPIM then at
some point conversions will take place before sending and after receiving on
the end.

Hope this helps.

"Pete Chown" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]...
> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to get up to speed with the current IMPP drafts, because I
> may need to implement the resulting protocol at some point.  (I'm also
> the author of RFC 3268, if you're curious.)
>
> As I understand it, you have a set of RFCs which form a requirements
> specification for the resulting protocol, is that right?  Then the CPIM
> drafts set out the format of instant messages and presence
> notifications.  Is there a document that specifies the protocol which
> will be used for transferring the messages defined in the CPIM drafts?
> (I guess like RFC 2821 is to RFC 2822.)
>
> Also, a while ago I checked here, and there were lots of rival drafts
> that all set out ways of implementing IM systems.  At that point I ran
> away and hid for a while, because it seemed that there was no chance of
> ever reaching consensus.  Now those drafts all seem to have gone away;
> is everyone backing CPIM now?
>
> Sorry to interrupt with all these questions.
>
> --
> Pete
>
>
>
>
>   [reminder: [email protected] for non-technical discussions, please]
>
>



  [reminder: [email protected] for non-technical discussions, please]