TheRaven64's Journal: iChat for Windows?

On Monday, Apple announced a whole load of shiny things. Potentially the most interesting of these (and the one that got the least coverage) was the iChat server, which will be part of OS X Server 10.4. It appears to be the Jabberd (or possibly Jabberd2) server, with a configuration GUI. The first reason this is nice is that it means that I can cross writing a Cocoa Jabberd configuration interface and creating a .app bundle off my To-Do list. The second is that iChat will fully support Jabber.

As you may be aware, iChat has used a slightly modified (serverless) version of Jabber for peer to peer chats. Now, it will be using Jabber for through-server traffic as well. At present, the marketing material refers to the fact that iChat server can be used from Windows or Linux using third-party clients, but it would be quite unlike Apple to release something like this without client support on the Windows side. This is especially true if they wish to include support for things like voice and video chats (currently supported by iChat, but not other Jabber clients). While I don't want to make any concrete predictions, it seems quite possible that Apple are going to release a version of iChat for Windows, supporting Jabber. The question then becomes whether the Windows version would support AIM. It seems unlikely that it would, given how much AOL dislike third party clients on their network.

Personally, I'm hoping that Apple will develop a 100% functional AIM <-> Jabber transport for their server, and migrate everything to Jabber (and I said something along these lines on the JDEV list shortly after the launch of iChat). Thoughts?