XMPP: lessons learned from ten years of XML messaging

Can an entire technology ecosystem be designed? Although we usually think of design and implementation in relation to particular features or applications, overall technologies - such as the session initiation protocol for voice over IP or the hypertext transfer protocol for the World Wide Web - can constrain the set of possible solutions to more well-bounded problems. Given the large scope of a technology ecosystem (including protocols, software implementations, application types, service deployments, and various stakeholders), we would expect to find that some of its aspects can be designed, some aspects can be guided in an approximate fashion, and other aspects exhibit an emergent order or no order whatsoever. To investigate such issues, this article summarizes some of the challenges faced, and lessons learned, by the extensible messaging and presence protocol developer community since 1999.