SIF & Jabber

Sam Ruby's elaboration on his latest technological "Long Bets" caused me to lose a few hours of work yesterday. Ruby includes Jabber in his five "bets," which reminded me of how much better suited the Jabber protocol is for doing the kind of messaging that SIF does than SIF's current (ab)use of HTTP. I thought about this quite a bit before I finally just started writing standard SIF applications a year or so ago, but I forced myself to just use HTTP. But it is so ugly and it would be so easy to use Jabber. It would probably be more easily accepted by the open source community. Creating an SIF_HTTP/Jabber bridge wouldn't even be that hard, it would just make for a lengthy chain HTTP_ZIS <-> BRIDGE <-> JABBER SERVER <-> JABBER AGENT. Anyhow, this was all short circuited by my inability to get the ejabberd server to run for utterly mysterious reasons.