XMPP in Wave in a box

From the wave in a box mailing list:

On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Dave wave@glark.co.uk wrote:

Protobuffs in XMPP might not be the most elegant wire protocol, but they're both proven, solid messaging technologies. I can see appeal in replacing them, but for my money the path of least resistance would be to improve these implementations.

They are???

Because you know, wave federation has never worked reliably. I gave a talk back in 2010 explaining how to set up federation in a virtual machine. I practiced my talk a few times, and sometimes (with exactly the same certificates, configuration files, software & OS) it simply wouldn't work. Why not? Two and a half YEARS have passed and still nobody knows.

XMPP server extensions are supposed to be a standard, but last I checked, only a couple of XMPP servers even half-work with wave in a box. Why? Because everyone has implemented the XMPP standard in slightly different, incompatible ways. Are the bugs in WIAB itself or in the XMPP servers? I don't know! The broken behaviour is so complicated that nobody understands how it works, let alone what the problem is.

Its pretty clear that we can't maintain federation based on an XMPP extension. We can't even fix obvious, repeatable bugs.

And we don't even use XMPP for anything! I thought we'd at least use the XMPP server to log in users but we don't even do that - we maintain our own user list. Its like we're using XMPP as a buggy, hard to configure TCP stream that nobody understands. I guess at least it
checks our SSL certificates. Whoopie.

I don't understand all the hero worship of XMPP. Has anyone else tried to actually read the spec? There's a reason Google, Apple, Facebook, etc don't use XMPP. Its not because they hate freedom. Its because XMPP is awful.

If you want to convince anyone that its a 'proven, solid messaging technology', you should start by fixing our XMPP extension code.

I think we should kill it with fire.