Real-time communications, presence and instant messaging: SIP versus XMPP, or SIP and XMPP?

摘要

Services and applications for real-time communications have been developed during the last decade in two different contexts with almost opposite approaches. On the one hand, telecommunications companies have developed technologies based on the session initiation protocol (SIP), in the first place to re-implement the traditional telephony service on the internet infrastructure, thus replacing the expensive circuit-switched network, but also enabling new communication channels like presence sharing and instant messaging. On the other hand, communities of open source developers have driven the evolution of open communication tools like e-mail and discussion systems towards the extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP). While the two worlds have virtually ignored each other for years, basically replicating the same set of features, recent events in the industry have revealed an interesting convergence between such technologies that in the near future is likely to make them either clash or integrate.