[sldev] Question: Replacing current group chat with XMPP?

[Joe Miller]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>
> I think what's worth keeping in mind is that some of the requirements
> (from Linden labs) for messaging seem to have been relaxed: Vivox
> doesn't appear to provide the difficult group requirement any more
> than XMPP does, so suddenly satisfying that is no longer important.
>
As I indicated in a blog reply, we did design SLim to support SL group
channels and proximal voice channels, both of which are fairly unique
communication abstractions for Second Life.  And, you'll see support for
both in a later release of SLim.  As you and others have pointed out, it
would be possible to create an XMPP client-side gateway to support
external IM systems, but without an easy way to handle large group channels.

The standard chosen for the SLim implementation is SIP/SIMPLE.  Here are
a couple references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMPLE (we use 'page' mode)
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/yanev/simplep.pdf

In Enterprise/Carrier scale environments Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and
Microsoft have soft/hard clients which use SIP/SIMPLE.
Some consumer-level soft clients are Gizmo, Gaim, Linphone, Windows
Messenger, Wengo, PingTel (and its descendants).

-- joe