Jabber for e-mail

Kmail This is one of the most evident sub-feature : Jabber could be used like e-mail Remember also that you can send message with Jabber even if the contact is offline, and that there is a builtin message type for mail-like message. There is also the possibility to keep server-side history (still in development).

A KMail-like program to display Jabber message would be great, it will allow an easy browsing of the history, but also a better interface to exchange long messages

Jabber to replace RSS

Akregator The publish-subscribe is a good candidate to replace rss feed. The principle is the same, you subscribe to a feed (a node in jabber terms), and an message notification is sent to you thought Jabber.

This is a better approach than the RSS which require you to download the .rss often, wasting bandwidth. Some RSS Jabber gateway already exists. But it could be better integrated in a akregator-like client

Jabber for address book

KAddressBook Jabber support natively a shared vCard, but also handle a contactlist, and allow you to store any kind of data on the server

So Jabber could be used to store all personal information, in order to synchronize them between clients (such as different computers or compatible smartphone)

Untypical information, such as the contact localisation, may also be retreived

Jabber and VoIP and Webcam

Webcam Jingle is a session negotiation protocol. It feature an invitation mechanism and a way to establish p2p connection, with NAT traversal. Voice over IP, webcam and filetransfers are only a subsets of the possibilities Jingle offer.

But Voice or Video conference and Instant messaging are very different concept, although they play well together. Similarly, web browsing and file managing are also very different, but both are done with Konqueror, but as different, well separated KParts That's why i think Voice and Video conference should be in a separate application, that Kopete could include as a KPart.

Jabber for web broswing

Konqueror Now comes some less evident features that show that XMPP may also be valuable in a web browser such as Konqueror.

For authentification to the Website, instead of having to enter a password. See the introduction of that SoC project for a more detailled use case.

Jabber can also be a place to Store bookmarks, to share them between several client.

And finally, Virtual Presence permits to see and engage chat to people that are on the same website as you in the same moment.

If all of this could be integrated in Konqueror it would be wonderfull.

Jabber for collaborative work

Kate XMPP may also be used as protocol for collaborative editing. Like abiword already do.

It can as well be used for whiteboard

Another pretty evident feature are Jabber group chat (aka MUC). They can pretty well replace IRC channel. This is the same concept, with some little, but visible improvements such as the last history when joining or the fact it is possible to invite every Jabber contact. In my opinion, conference and IM are different usecase, and would be better implemented in a separated client.

Games

Games

Every multiplayer game would benefit of the XMPP protocol, not only for invitation, but also for ready to use connection. Currently there are very few KDE multiplayers game, but using XMPP for the connection layer would make developping multi-player game very easy.

Jabber may also have multimedia applications. I'm not talking about File Sharing or Peer to peer file transfer, but about User tune which let you know what your contact listen, and eventually listen the same.

Jabber for everything.

Kmenu This is just a preview of the possibilities of XMPP.

Now, I suggest a Jabber library into kdelibs. The idea is not new but I think we were not ready at this time, most people did not understand Jabber was not only for IM, and Jabber itself has been developed a lot since then.

Jabber Some advantage of using XMPP:

  • You have a session layer, with encryption, compression, feature negotiation for free
  • You benefit from client-server architecture without having to develop the server
  • You have global identifier (the JID), no need to register yet another login/password for each service, or exchange the IP address, just give your JID
  • The protocol is open, and there exists several open libraries that can make your program quickly interoperable.

I hope you are now more aware of the huge potential of XMPP, and what it could give in KDE.