Programming Jabber

The Pre-Jabber History

While the concept of live chat systems has existed for many years, with commands such as Unix’s talk and VMS’s phone, IM as we know it today existed as a concept and a handful of systems from companies such as Mirabilis, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. These systems (ICQ from Mirabilis, AIM from AOL, MSN from Microsoft, and Yahoo!IM from Yahoo!) allowed their users to chat to one another and avail themselves of IM-related services. However, an AIM user couldn’t chat with an ICQ user, and MSN users couldn’t interact with Yahoo!IM users. Each system was effectively closed to the outside world.

Furthermore, the protocols that these systems used were also mostly closed—proprietary—which meant it was difficult to find clients for these IM systems other than the ones supplied by the IM system owner.

Finally, the systems themselves were monolithic: multiple clients but a single server (or server farm). Although the companies were able to invest time and money into the problem, the fact remained that a monolithic architecture presented a scaling problem. Perhaps more relevant than that, companies that wanted to use IM services internally had to accept the fact that the conversations would be carried through the systems of a third party—namely the owners of these public IM systems. This was no more desirable than for a company to run its internal email using a public email service such as Hotmail.

Of course, these systems did have their advantages. The clients were ...