Re: Trying to summarize discussion on SIMPLE interop

2012/10/30 Saúl Ibarra Corretgé <[email protected]>:
>> The short-term plan is to focus on the existing set of recommendations in RFCs and try to find out
>> which implementation guidelines and maybe extra set of documents that are needed to get a
>> baseline interoperability in handling of a simple buddy list, presence involving multiple devices
>> and presence authorization. There seems to be an agreement that MSRP based chat works.
>>
>> The long-term plan is to spend time on developing something that would be much easier to implement,
>> not require 18 (or more) subscriptions with states and be easier to interoperate with XMPP.
>>
>> I personally would like to focus on the short term plan for now. I want agreement on a
>> set of implementation guidelines so we can get the available softphones (and hardphones
>> that implement SIMPLE) to interoperate using standard open source servers like OpenSIPS,
>> OpenXCAP and Kamailio (and possibly others). If it's not possible, well, then at least we tried to
>> fix it and we can divert attention on either XMPP or developing a SIMPLE--.
>>
>
> I agree. We (kind of) took this approach and managed to build something that works, so it's doable. It would be great if we could put together some recommendations / specifications for these items you highlighted: a buddy list, multi-device presence and authorization.


The "short-term" plan looks no so "short" for me (taking into account
that AG, really experts in this area has required years of work to
make all the SIMPLE/XCAP stuff to work). If the short-term plan
requires that a developer team starting with SIMPLE must work over 2-3
years to implement all the specs, I would not name it "short-term" at
all.

In the other side, implementing XMPP is 100 times easier, more
feasible and more robust than implementing current SIMPLE/XCAP specs
plus the suggested "extra layer" for properly defining what exactly to
implement and how to build basic features such as a working
addressbook.

And remember: XCAP is not XPath 1.0 compliant (since XCAP introduces
the concept of "default document namespace" to save ~20 bytes in a
HTTP request) which means that developers cannot use the well known
libxml library. Who will ask them for coding their own libxml-xcap
library? (not me).

And one more thing: As I noted in previous mails, SIMPLE model fits
very bad in the modern Internet environments (smartphones). SIMPLE
requires mantaining dozens of SIP dialogs (subscriptions) and
mantaining a dialog in a smartphone is a bad idea (it looses the
connection, restarts it with a different IP, etc etc) and it's a
battery overkill.

So, honestly, if I new effort is desired I strongly doubt that the way
to go is rescuing SIMPLE specs. The effort will be giant for newcomers
and the result will be poor for environments different than private or
fixed networks.

Just my opinion.


-- 
Iñaki Baz Castillo
<[email protected]>
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