Will SIMPLE survive?
Will SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) make any real impact on the market?
So far it seems that more developers and customers are using XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), as made real by Jabber.
As a real world example, with a couple of others I'm doing some experimentation with an easily available SIP server from IPtel. The software seems to work well and a softphone from Xten is a workable and pretty (if sometimes annoying) way to interact.
Voice calls seem to work just fine. Now we'd like to try some instant messaging. In particular, it would be nice to hook a system monitoring application into the environment, to allow alerts to be sent. What API and client library implementation do we use to achieve this? Not being a Java programmer somewhat rules out JAIN and friends. A brief search via Google doesn't lead to any obvious Python or Perl modules, which means that it's back to C or C++ using the Vovida or GNU oSIP libraries. Do those libraries actually implement the SIMPLE extension to SIP?
If we had chosen XMPP as our underlying IM protocol, something might be working later the same day in Python or Perl.
On a slightly more amusing note, choosing to call the protocol SIMPLE ensures that searching for relevant material on the 'net is much more difficult.