Okay, so eight to ten years ago, when IM was just starting up and ICQ was the next big thing, I started following the work of an open source project called Jabber whose goal was create an open source instant messaging system. Being open source guys, they didn’t like the idea of being tied to a single company’s system. They much prefered a federated system, like email, where anyone can run a server, and there is an established protocol for servers talking to each other. So, that’s how they set their system up. XML was also a ‘next big idea’ at the time, so they decided to make a DTD for messaging, another for presence and contacts, and have the server, at its core, just by an XML router which routed the appropriate message documents to the appropriate contacts. Being forward looking guys, they knew this would make the system extensible, and, even at the time, had big ideas about adding DTDs that would support things like real-time white boarding and other collaboration tools. The Jabber guys established their niche, but the general public had already chosen one the handful of proprietary messaging platforms was happy enough that they saw no reason to leave.
What, you are probably asking, does all of this have to do with the Google Maps Team and lightning? Well, as good internet citizens, the Jabber guys documented they protocol and went through the hassle of getting it established as an ITEF standard known as an RFC. This standard was called extensible messaging and presence protocol, or XMPP. Many organizations have used this standard as the basis of their own messaging platforms. Among these was Google, who used it as the basis of Gtalk. Which, finally, bring me back to the Google Maps Team. After their technology was bought by Google and turned into Google Maps, they decided to work on something new: a real-time messaging and collaboration platform. After eighteen months work, the results, called Google Wave, were previewed at this week’s Google IO conference, and the results are astounding. I won’t attempt to explain it you just need to watch it:
Much as I suspected while watching the video, when I read their published protocol specification at waveprotocol.org, I learned that the whole thing is built on a extensions to XMPP. At the guts of the Wave are XML DTDs for wave detlas being streamed around, serialized, and sycnronized. This is going to be huge, and the Maps Team deserves the praise. But, it all started with the vision of the Jabber folks.
