You might question yourself why ejabberd does not support Adobe Flash 8.0 (and lower) by default. There is a patch for Flash 8 support in ejabberd, so why do we not include that patch in ejabberd's mainstream release? The reason is simple: we do not want to see the same troubles in the XMPP community tomorrow, that make the Web less open today. On the Web, people do not take care of strict implementation of open standards. The result is that web browsers, web site building tools, web masters, CMSes, amongst others all need to handle implementation differences in software and bugs in web pages. The result of this unstrict implementation behaviour of open standards, is that the Web is less open than it could be, as the nonchalant use of open standards creates entry barriers for newcomers:

• Web masters needs much knowledge about bugs in different web browsers and/or web building tools, this makes it more difficult to become a professional or amateur webmaster.
• Web browsers require a higher degree of complexity due to the need to bypass implementation bugs in web sites. Creating a new web browser codebase is more difficult for both companies and individuals.
• The same statement for web browsers also applies to web publishing tools.

Compared to the W3C specifications, XMPP open standards are strictly implemented whereas W3C specifications are unstrictly implemented. This causes thing look much better in the XMPP world. Clients, servers or libraries that do not comply with the specifications, simply will get in trouble with communicating to other XMPP compatible software and are in this way forced to fix the implementation errors. For example, a long time ago we used to receive reports of GAIM related issues in our forums. Due to the fact we do not receive such reports anymore, we assume the issues are fixed in newer versions of GAIM. So ,because XMPP implementors do not need to spend time on bypassing implementation bugs in other software, it is much easier, faster and cheaper to implement XMPP in software. Probably this implementor-friendly climate is one of the reasons why there are so many compatible XMPP clients, servers, and libraries.

Adobe Flash 8 (and lower) do not allow XMPP compliant communication. Because ejabberd do not want the XMPP world becoming a mess like the Web, ejabberd do not accept by default this unstandard behaviour of Flash 8 (and lower) . We do not like entry barriers; we like to see as many good and compatible XMPP implementations as possible. Instead, we encourage you to use Flash 9 and to request Adobe stable Flash 9 releases for all systems, to boycot Flash technology in favour of another technology like Javascript, and/or to return thanks to server projects that do not have bypasses for bugs like the Flash 8 bugs in their mainstream server releases.

Whitelist and Blacklist

In order to discourage XMPP server projects with a bypass for the Flash 8 bugs in their mainstream distribution, and in order to give server projects that refuse to do this a competitive advantage, we created a whitelist and a blacklist. The whitelist contains servers that do not have bypasses in the release versions of their software, whereas the blacklist lists the servers that do. Please add a comment if you find any error or mistake.

Whitelist

• djabberd
• ejabberd
• jabberd14
• jabberd2 (sorry, we do not know the current website of this project)
• Tigase

Blacklist

• Wildfire