Re: [Ekiga-list] Ekiga and the Empathy app

[yannick <sevmek free fr>]

Le mardi 12 août 2008 à 12:13 +0200, Damien Sandras a écrit :
> Le mardi 12 août 2008 à 11:56 +0200, Duncan Lithgow a écrit :
> > I have just begun to look at Telepathy (as Empathy on Gnome) and can
> > see that it implements SIP. What does this mean for Ekiga when Gnome
> > makes Empathy the default IM client in 2.24?
> 
> Not sure what will happen in that case, but Ekiga is not an IM client,
> but an IP Telephony software, which is different.

Indeed.

As far as I can tell, the purpose of Empathy is quit different SIP-wise.
Empathy tries to support many protocols, most of them not designed for
Telephony (think of feature like connect to a PBX, call on hold, call
forward, call transfert, bridge with PSTN network etc.). What I see now
is they try to get the common denominators between each protocols thus
you'll get only basics features which are present in all those
protocols. For now the features available in the client (Empathy) are
very poor compared to the SIP stack they use (sofia sip), e.g. there is
no presence support for SIP in Empathy at the moment.

Ekiga tries to get a deep support for the SIP specification, which is
very large specification, there is a lot to do...

Integrating presence support for SIP and XMPP (jabber) in the same
client (e.g. like Empathy tries) is problematic. Some people think it is
just a matter of mapping between the protocols but the difference
between XMPP and SIP is huge. XMPP is client-server based while SIP is
peer to peer based. see e.g. this critic:
http://antecipate.blogspot.com/2006/06/unnecessary-interoperability-drafting.html

"(...)SIP presence is based on short lived publish-subscribe, initiated
by the requesting user agent. This is the opposite of XMPP, where the
server acts as a proxy for the client user agent. SIP relies on
expiration to cancel subscriptions. XMPP sessions do not time out. SIP
is connectionless, whereas XMPP relies on the client connection state to
deduce the end of a client session."

This make the presence interoperability between SIP and XMPP in the same
client something really hard.

Still there is interesting work on this issue:
e.g. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/simple/current/msg07964.html

We can expect future improvement in this area...

I do not expect Empathy to be feature full compared to Ekiga regarding
SIP in the short term, but who really knows?

Best regards,
Yannick

> -- 
>  _     Damien Sandras
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