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It’s funny how things work out. I remember a few years ago, while working on our H.323 stack, that SIP was starting to make some noise. Cool people started talking about it as if it was the best thing out there – way better than that old and clucky H.323 thingy.

The sad truth of the evolution of protocols

The Dark Ages

Well, guess what? Both protocols started at about the same time, which some people regard as “the dark ages”. One got adopted by the ITU and had somewhat of a head start with deployments (H.323), the other one got adopted by the IETF and is now the de-facto standard for the world of VoIP (SIP).

I remember in particular a meeting with Paul Jones, an amazing system architect from Cisco, who knows a lot about protocols and was working tirelessly on improving H.323 (and now on AMS). He complained at the time about the comparisons between H.323 and SIP you find on various websites that don’t do justice to H.323 – they take the oldest version of it and compare it to the latest version of SIP. This awards some unjust positive points to SIP.

People usually complained about how H.323 is impossibly complex, with its binary messages. In that same sentence they usually praised SIP for its simplicity and ease of use.

How time flies…

The Middle Ages

As I already mentioned, SIP is currently the de-facto winner in the H.323-SIP standard war. But out of the IETF comes a new nagging protocol, which has its target set on SIP. That would be XMPP.

I have already compared SIP to XMPP in several posts in the past. If you need a refresher, here’s my post on the complexity of SIP and simplicity of XMPP. To me it seems that the more a protocol gets used, the more complex it becomes – people just want to continue using it for more scenarios, find it lacking and add patches on top of it.

So if you are looking at a protocol, and it looks like one huge patch, it’s a good sign that people are using it and there’s a living and breathing ecosystem for it.

The XMPP Age

A post by Peter Saint-Andre on his blog one small voice really made me happy. Peter was trying to defend XMPP’s simplicity:

I’m getting a bit tired of all the unsupported allegations from people like Anil Dash and Adam Fisk that XMPP is bloated or impossible to deploy. Now maybe I’m just a bit snarky at the moment because it’s 5:30 AM where I am in Hiroshima Japan and I got 3 hours of sleep last night [...]

Who would have guessed? XMPP is bloated. May I also add complex? Not easy to use?!

That’s a good sign. There are people out there who actually criticize XMPP and not only people who are fans of it.

The only thing left to say to the people working on XMPP is: welcome to the grownups world! You are now one of us – one of the people who work on protocols that get to deal with the fact that life is complex.

We’ll see who will be the next cool protocol out there, trying to take the crown away from XMPP or from SIP – both are not going away in the next couple of years.