OMA IMPS Why Bother?
I have been a subscriber to the ph-mobiletech yahoogroup for quite sometime. I do participate in a bit of discussion when I feel like it. But, I am mostly in lurker mode. Lately, there have been some discussions lead by Migs Paraz on the availability of an open source Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) server. Unfortunately, we can’t seem to find one. There are a number of open services but not source.
In this discussion, one of the posters, Roger, questioned the need for OMA IMPS. He promoted the use of the IETF XMPP instead. He says why re-invent the wheel and promote a large number of different IMPS protocols. I feel that OMA IMPS is necessary. Maybe a transition technology but necessary. Here are some of my takes on the matter.
- Both IETF XMPP and OMA IMPS benefit from being XML-based. This allows them both to be very extensible and flexible. XML is easily extended and is standardized enough to be able to write parsers that can easily recover data encoded in XML. This is not the case for SIP/SIMPLE. Use of XML is important for better interoperability with other devices and systems.
- OMA IMPS and IETF SIP/SIMPLE are both built to run on top of an HTTP-like protocol. This is beneficial for both protocols as being HTTP-based allows a whole swath of Internet technology to automatically support them. The use of HTTP also allows them to take advantage of robustness and stability of this technology. IETF XMPP, on the other hand, uses its own wire protocol. This is particularly problematic when used in mobile phone networks. Mobile phone networks were originally build around WAP and even today most mobile phone data traffic is managed by a WAP gateway. WAP is another protocol that uses HTTP like communications. Therefore, if the wire protocol of the IMPS technology is HTTP-like too then it is similiar in structure to WAP and therefore work very well with each other.
- OMA IMPS was built for mobile with mobile limitations in mind. This might not be a reason for long (as phones become more powerful and are capable of doing fancy things). However, the fact is that today, most phones can’t open raw sockets (so can do XMPP), don’t have built-in IETF XMPP or IETF SIP/SIMPLE clients (but they do have OMA IMPS clients), and carriers are likely to block other protocols (to protect their walled garden) and only allow HTTP.
So with these three (3) simple reasons (of course, there are more) alone, it is pretty clear that support OMA IMPS is still important if an IM provider would like to penetrate the mobile phone network market. For more discussion on the existing open standards IMPS protocols, check out this previous blog of mine. I also did a comparison between SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP.
