One other point about the WSJ article. People from the SIP camp often say that XMPP is just for IM, Dale Malik's quote notwithstanding. A couple of months ago, I wrote an Internet Draft specifying how to initiate and negotiate sessions using SDPng over XMPP, called TINS. Using TINS, you can negotiate a connection between two endpoints, including protocols (RTP, H.323, etc.), codecs, and other client capabilities, so that the two clients can connect directly to one another.
The semantics are similar enough to SIP that a gateway at the edge of the XMPP network can translate SIP/SDP to/from TINS, so you could, for instance, ring a SIP phone from an XMPP client, based on the presence you get from your roster. The benefit to using TINS is that it is very lightweight, easy to understand, and scalable since it relies on XMPP for transport semantics.
Posted by jhildebrand at July 16, 2003 03:29 PM