Google switches GTalk's VOIP protocol to Jingle

http://xmpp.org/2011/06/the-future-is-jingle/

by sciurus • 15 years ago

169 47 15 years ago

pthatcherg4• 15 years ago

My original email had more details:

We are pleased to announce that we have launched support for Jingle XEP-166 and XEP-167 for Google Talk calls to and from Gmail, iGoogle, and Orkut. We have also added the same level of support to libjingle (http://code.google.com/p/libjingle), which is used by many native clients. From this point on, it will be our primary signalling protocol, and the old protocol will only remain for backwards compatibility. We also plan to soon update Google Talk on Android to speak Jingle, but we do not plan on updating the Google Talk Windows application.

We suggest all clients that interop with Google Talk to switch to using Jingle rather than the old protocol. We will remain backwards compatible with legacy clients by continuing to speak the old protocol as well. If you wish to continue working with legacy clients, such as the Google Talk application for Windows, you may also wish to continue speaking the old protocol. But the future is Jingle, and the old protocol will eventually go away.

Finally, we are still working on implementing XEP-176 (ICE-UDP). In the meantime, you'll need to use our draft-06 version of ICE, which is implemented both in libjingle and in libnice, two open source libraries.

I hope that this will be a support to the Jingle community and futher our efforts to have open standards for voice and video communication.

car3• 15 years ago

In light of interoperability, could you please address the Google rationale for going with XMPP rather then SIP, as there is considerable support for SIP in existence, e.g. IMS on 4G networks, VoIP providers, PSTN gateways, Skype Connect, etc.?

jbeda• 15 years ago

I'm one of the authors of the XEP and was part of the Google Talk team back in the day. I haven't been working on it in quite a while so I really don't speak for the current team.

First off, I'm super proud of these guys finishing off this work. It was a long time coming.

As for why we chose XMPP over SIP: The team had made the choice to base the core IM product on XMPP before I joined. That decision was based on the ease of implementation and interoperability. XMPP for IM is much simpler than SIP/SIMPLE. The easiest answer here is that it was the most logical fit to the product we had built at the time.

My personal opinion of SIP is based on a 6 year old snapshot of the technology. Things have undoubtedly changed in the meantime. Based on that snapshot, I wasn't a fan at the time.

- It is an amazingly complex and confusing technology. It is worth noting that SIP is the longest IETF RFC out there. Meanwhile, the core XMPP spec is easy to understand and implement. It is also an IETF standard. Extensions are well modularized and documented.

- The security is hacked on after the fact and, at the time, was unevenly implemented. In basic SIP, one unauthenticated UDP packet makes a phone ring. XMPP security is based on TLS and DNS and is a required part of the core.

- Federation was a patchy mess and showed SIP's telecom roots. You pretty much had to get the lawyers involved to do anything. Federation in XMPP is a DNS SRV lookup.

The world has moved forward since then so hopefully this provides some context for the decision at the time.

ZeroGravitas• 15 years ago

Why is the Google Talk application for Windows considered legacy? Are you hoping to shift them to WebRTC in Chrome?

senko• 15 years ago

The annoucement email itself: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/jingle/2011-June/001640.htm...

This is great news. Google has been one of the driving forces behind Jingle, but as they were implementing it far in advance of being standardised, the drafts/standards have since changed. Other implementations have to maintain support for several close but not quite the same dialects. Google updating their software will make interop much easier.

I've been somewhat critical of Google's attempts in this direction (http://senko.net/en/gmail-videochat-the-good-the-bad-and-the...), and I'm very glad to see I was wrong :)

illumin8• 15 years ago

I wonder what impact this will have on 3rd party devices like the great Obihai that interface with Google Voice?

http://www.obihai.com

pthatcherg4• 15 years ago

I don't know how Obihai works, but if it uses SIP to talk to Google Voice, this will not effect them.

ComputerGuru• 15 years ago

I wonder why the Windows client will officially not be updated to Jingle? If it was just "not at the moment," they would have either kept mum or said so, but to actually say that it won't be updated..... that says a lot.

seabee2• 15 years ago

The official client never got video chat support either. It's received very little love over the past couple of years.

Personally I think the only native client they are interested in anymore is Gmail in Chrome...

pthatcherg4• 15 years ago

We care about gmail on all browsers :).

mkopinsky• 15 years ago

Has it received _any_ love over the years? My impression is that the program came as a freebie with some acquisition and they've never touched it since. Opening up googletalk-setup.exe in Archive Manager (aka file-roller), it seems like the lastmodify date on the most recent files is January 1, 2007.

sthustfo• 15 years ago

Well, I am not sure why Google went with XMPP when the rest of the telecom and networking industry is gravitating towards IETF SIP as signaling protocol. There are so may overlaps in both of them in the sense that they use the same components such as SDP and ICE. Can anyone from Google or otherwise throw some more light on

- Why Google prefers XMPP over SIP - In what areas XMPP is better that SIP

I am not stating that one is better than the other, but would like to understand the core differences and advantages.

Also with Google moving on with XMPP and other major vendors converging on SIP, where do you see the inter-operability issue heading towards?

lenni2• 15 years ago

I guess SIP has weak support for Instant Messaging, which was the primary use case for Google Talk before video chat came along.

On the other hand the Jingle spec [1] contains many references to SIP:

"Furthermore, Jingle is not intended to supplant or replace existing Internet technologies based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP; RFC 3261). Because dual-stack XMPP+SIP clients are difficult to build, Jingle was designed as a pure XMPP signalling protocol. However, Jingle is at the same time designed to interwork with SIP so that the millions of deployed XMPP clients can be added onto existing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks, rather than limiting XMPP users to a separate and distinct network."

[1] http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/technology-overview/jingle/

car3• 15 years ago

If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways.

I really don't understand why the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and the telcos can't agree on a standard. Guess business reasons are behind this. After all, walled gardens are great if you are the incumbent, it's how Skype got to be so valued.

Maybe the FCC should step in and take this on.

pkaler• 15 years ago

XMPP is much more extensible than SIP. Presence, messaging, and IM work much better in XMPP. There are extensions for archiving messages, return receipts, etc. There are extensions for file transfer.

There are extensions for vCards. There are extensions for PubSub.

XMPP works over HTTP using BOSH. It can also work over SOCKS.

Apache/Google Wave uses XMPP for federation. It is just flat out more extensible and featureful. Just like the acronym stands for: Extensible Messaging and Presence. It does a whole lot more than just IM or just VoIP.

http://xmpp.org/xmpp-protocols/xmpp-extensions/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave#Federation_Protocol

sciurus• 15 years ago

For information on support in GNOME's Empathy IM client and on Maemo/MeeGo, see http://blog.barisione.org/2011-06/broken-gtalk-calls/

lenni2• 15 years ago

Can iChat speak Jingle?

I just tried the combination of web-based Gmail <-> iChat and the web client can see that the iChat client has a camera and I can initiate a call but iChat never shows an incoming one.

If I go iChat<->iChat over Google's XMPP server I can make a call. Does iChat speak yet another incompatible video call extension if it used with an XMPP network?

Adium can't do AV either.... Can anyone recommend a OS X client? Video chat is currently the last thing that stops me from uninstalling Flash.

sudont2• 15 years ago

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#ichat6

iChat in Lion will features service plugins.

spicyj• 15 years ago

It's not clear whether this includes audio and video? It may be only for text chats.

drivebyacct22• 15 years ago

What? Use the video chat built into Gmail. That doesn't utilize flash...

abraham2• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure Gmail still uses flash for the audio but I could be wrong.

lloeki• 15 years ago

Pidgin has a/v for all Unices and that may just include Mac OS X. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

JacobIrwin• 15 years ago

Google Translate integrated with Jingle could/will be a joy to use.

I would love to talk to a college student in Greece about the local economic sentiment over VoIP.

mayel• 15 years ago

Check out http://babelverse.com/ A startup coming out of Greece btw :)

kalleboo• 15 years ago

I find it a real shame Apple have no interest in making their iMessages and FaceTime networks interoperate with XMPP and instead going their own way. We're going to end up with people on different mobile OSes hesitating to communicate with each other because they'll fall back on expensive SMSes (a network effect much like today with discounted in-network calling).

riffic• 15 years ago

Skype is dead, and Microsoft just wasted $8.5 billion for that poison company.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

How does this play with WebRTC? Are they complementary technologies?

pthatcherg4• 15 years ago

Yes, complimentary. You could use WebRTC to implement a Jingle client.

aaronrc• 15 years ago

Anyone know if this update applies to Google Voice? And whether it will now be possible to initiate a standard RTP stream via XMPP? That would make SIP interoperability with Google Voice practical. At the moment it's held back by the fact that Google Voice requires some custom ICE packets to be exchanged on the RTP sockets before it will commence sending RTP. Which means there are no SIP clients that can talk RTP with Google Voice when the call is initiated over XMPP :(.

Google switches GTalk's VOIP protocol to Jingle

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