Jabber, xmpp and C#
Why should Jabber be interesting to someone who designs rich internet applications?
In short: it resolves the issue of polling. Poll a feed to see if a post is new, poll a RESTful URL to see if the data has changed, heck, I’ve even polled Web pages and regexed the output – controlled from a windows service – to see if a bank’s interest rates have changed. Polling is wasteful. Most of the time nothing has changed, if you increase the interval (say to a few days) then services which rely on frequent intervals (say: Nokia location based services). Even Google is using XMPP for its “Google Talk” application. The xmpp protocol is stateful. It works on the subscribe and publish model, or “callbacks” for you old skoolers.
The interesting thing is how using the xmpp protocoll will enable large communities – and more specifically the mashup services their users rely on – to scale up well. Imagine tens of thousands of facebook users tweeting to each other whenever a treasured contact uploads a picture on flickr. Companies are now building services to do just that.
Well, now you can access that goodness from c#, using two libraries, one from AG Software and another from Jabber-Net. Have fun 
