Extended Conversation

Live from the XMPP Hackfest in Brussels, Belgium, here is the XMPP Roundup 13, dedicated this time to new and updated services. As announced before, the XMPP Roundup has been split into separate parts with “articles, talks and events” and “new and updated software” already published.

This Roundup was brought to you with contributions from Alexander Gnauck, Will Sheward, Guillaume Le Galès, Kevin Smith, and Nicolas Vérité.

EVE Online

The EVE Online science-fiction MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) is using an XMPP service for in-game chats (also offering e-mail), on the eve-mail.net domain, with S2S (server-to-server) open for federation.

Interactive XMPP demos

The Google App Engine blog has listed a few interactive XMPP demos, like CrowdGuru, a crowdsourcing answers bot, and Multi-Chat, an IRC-like chatroom system.

Jabcast XMPP

Desktop Alert Inc. have released Jabcast XMPP, allowing public and private sector users of the Common Alerting Protocol to broadcast alerts using XMPP. More information is available at the press release.

PuSH Bot: PubSubHubbub to XMPP Gateway

A PubSubHubbub to XMPP gateway had already been mentioned in the previous Roundup, but PuSH Bot is a new such gateway running on http://push-bot.appspot.com/. The code is available under the Apache V2.0 license at the partychapp project (XMPP-based chatrooms for Google Talk).

Collecta’s XMPP API

Collecta, the real-time search engine, has published a new XMPP API. Take look at it, it is really simple.

Tlen.pl XMPP federation

Tlen.pl, or “oxygen” in polish, is a slightly modified XMPP service. It features voice calls, SMS and video conference. Tlen.pl has been compatible since a long time with Gadu-gadu, the most used IM service in Poland (proprietary client, service, and protocol). Tlen.pl is now open to XMPP federation.

Today’s Special

Prashant Thakkar has written a bot that serves quotes of the day, words of the day, historical events of the day, horoscope of the day, joke of the day, as well as cricket scores. Just add todays-special@appspot.com to your roster and send ‘help’ to get a list of commands.

Clisearch Jabber bot

Clisearch is a Jabber bot that will answer your queries, subscribe to RSS feeds and topics, manage your tasks and bookmarks, plus help you count with a calculator. Just add agent@clisearch.net to your roster and start by typing the usual ‘help’. Clisearch is brought to you by Roman Kvasnyj from Russia and Anurag Bhatia from India.

BBC’s LiveText-via-IP

The famous British broadcaster, the BBC is doing LiveText-via-IP by sending PubSub events to all browsers listening to BBC online radio.

XMPPguru

Thiago has talked about XMPPguru a new appspot XMPP bot that answers to your general questions.

pip.io

“Pipio is a social operating system that aims to give people the ability to share and communicate in real-time. You can search what other people are communicating about in real-time based on contextual, geographical, and chronological relevance.” More precisely, it is a web applications that mimics a desktop environment.

jabber.org migration

The jabber.org XMPP service has now migrated to M-Link server from Isode. Registration is still closed as the service is in stabilization phase.

The polish Nasza Klasa social network on XMPP: NKtalk

Nasza Klasa (“our class” in polish) is a large social network site in Poland. The NKTalk chat system is based on erlang and XMPP.

lyricsfly

Jack Moffitt mentions Abhinav Singh’s bot lyricsfly and tutorials on applications development based on the JAXL library.

U Federation

Guillaume Le Galès has launched U Federation, a new beta service for personalized multi-user chats, based on XMPP. It lets you groupchat and broadcast live audio/video in the MUC.

ReaTiWe and PaaS

ReaTiWe (for “real-time web”) is an application hosted on the Google App Engine (GAE), which is a “playground for all cool real-time-related stuff”, including technologies such as XMPP, WebHooks, and PuSH (PubSubHubbub). It relies on PaaS for Presence-as-a-Service, which is using XMPP presence stanza for microblogging. Both ReaTiWe and PaaS source codes are published by Stoyan Zhekov.

Google Wave gateway

ProcessOne has put online a Google Wave gateway on the Talkr.IM public XMPP server.

Feel free to talk about the XMPP Roundup everywhere, especially on your blogs and microblogs.

Welcome to the XMPP software Roundup 13. As announced in the latest Roundup, we have split it into different parts. The first part covered articles, talks and events. This post covers new and updated software, the next one will cover XMPP services.

Special thanks to Will, Waqas, Jack, Guillaume, Nicolas, who have actively contributed to this report.

Due to the high number of new items (yes, the XMPP community is super-active), we have sectionned these into the classical division clients, servers, and libraries, and… a last section you should check carefully.

Clients

Jabbim for Android

The Jabbim team has released an early version of Jabbim for Android, the Linux-based OS platform for mobile phones and devices from Google.

joom

Released under the Artistic and GPL licenses, joom is a collaborative brainstorming tool, similar to a group chat plus topics creation. First originality, the UI combines the personal roster, as well as the room roster. The other originality, is that the UI shows different views of the conversations: the regular stream of messages, and the active and inactive topic views, which filter out messages with certain hashtags. Thus it is possible to hold mulitple conversations in one room.

Gajim 0.13

Yann Le Boulanger, aka Asterix, has announced the release 0.13 of the Gajim XMPP client, bringing BOSH, roster versionning, XHTML-IM sending, and many bug fixes.

Coccinella 0.96.16 Released

Sander Devrieze has announced Coccinella 0.96.16, bringing a lot of bug fixes, as well as a tenth birthday.

Psi 0.14 is out

This time we’ve made sure Psi is not missed in the Roundup: Justin Karneges has announced the version 0.14 of the Psi XMPP client. It brings color options to the chat window, reason for kick/ban in groupchat, improved User Info window, support for Enchant as an alternative to Aspell, commandline interface now supports choosing profile and setting status, D-BUS interface now supports setting status and indicating sleep/wake, fixed voice calling compatibility bugs with Pidgin and Empathy, and of course various other minor improvements and bugfixes.

Haskell: XMPP and matsuri

matsuri is a ncurses XMPP client written on Haskell, published under the GPLv3 license by Kagami.

Yaxim

Yaxim is new XMPP client for the Android platform.

Juick for Android

Juick, the real-time blogging and social network platform based on XMPP, has a specific client on the Android platform.

Vacuum-IM

Vacuum-IM is a new multi-account, multi-platform XMPP client. It uses the Qt library, and is released under the GPLv3 license, as a version number 1.0.

Servers

Openfire under the Apache license

The Openfire server is undergoing a change of license, from the GPL to the Apache 2.0 license. The next version with the updated license will be released in the near future.

Legacy IM Connections via M-Link

Isode has announced that they are partnering with Zion Software to deploy the JBuddy XMPP Gateway for connectivity between Isode’s M-Link server software and legacy IM networks.

Tigase Server 4.3

Artur Hefczyc has released version 4.3 of the Tigase Server. It contains a lot of performance improvements, as well as new features, like monitoring, scripting, or roster versionning, and much more.

Spectrum

Spectrum is an XMPP gateway, released under the GPL license, using the libpurple and gloox libraries, coming from a Google Summer of Code project. It supports ICQ, XMPP (Jabber, GTalk), AIM, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Gadu-Gadu, IRC and SIMPLE.

python-xmpp-server

python-xmpp-server speaks for itself, it has been developed by Medium.

Clustering plugin for Openfire is now open source

Ignite Realtime has announced the release of the clustering plugin for Openfire as opensource, under the Apache 2.0 license.

Prosody 0.6 and 1 year old

Prosody, which is one year old, has been published in version 0.6, bringing a telnet console, multi-sessions in MUC, stream compression, S2S encryption, per-host certificates, an importer for ejabberd MySQL dumps, and compatibility with ejabberd’s vcard behaviour.

Libraries

Strophe.js 1.0

Jack Moffit has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Strophe.js library.

MatriX Mobile and MatriX for .NET released

Alexander Gnauck has released MatriX Mobile for the .NET Compact Framework, as well as MatriX for .NET.

asmack

The asmack library has been released. Basically, it a the smack library, adding SASL and DNS SRV for the Android platform.

Libjingle in Chromium

Libjingle, the Google’s opensource library for Jingle, has been committed in Chromium, the opensource base of the Chrome browser.

GWT bindings for the Strophe XMPP library

Johann Prieur has announced on his blog the availability through Bazaar of gwt-strophe, under the MIT/X/Expat License, a binding for Strophe, the XMPP library. It is now in its early stage, and need testing and bug reports.

Emite

Emite 0.5.0 has been released, now with support for GWT 2.0. Emite is a GWT XMPP library (Google Web Toolkit) under the LGPL v3 license.

gloox 1.0

The famous gloox library, for clients and components, has been released in version 1.0, under the GPL license. This should not be confused with the glooxd libray, made for servers.

retepXMPP Server, Client & Library

retepXMPP is a suite of libraries for writing applications using the XMPP protocol, with which it is possible to create components, clients or even embedded servers.

Unclassifiable (aka “Others”)

Although the title of this section might sound a bit demeaning, this is the place you should focus, because it is sometimes the place where most interesting (weird?) innovations appears…

Jorge

Zbyszek Zólkiewski has written Jorge, a free PHP-based front-end for the mod_logdb message archiving system for ejabberd written by Oleg Palij.

xeerkat

xeerkat is a P2P computing framework over XMPP. xeerkat is not a new project, but original and not previously covered by the XMPP Roundup.

XMPP Framework

XMPP Framework, using XMPPHP, brings XMPP features to Drupal: XMPP-Drupal users correlation and relationship, XWChat web chat client (based on JSJaC), MUC, and notifications. This module has been contributed by Darren Ferguson of OpenBand.

XMPPKit

The Étoilé user environment for the GNUstep project is building in support for sending what they call “CoreObjects” over XMPP using their emerging XMPPKit; as a result they hope to enable collaborative editing, whiteboarding, and other interactive applications.

RDFbus

The Ruby software RDFbus, published under a BSD-like license, is a middleware for enabling RDF publish/subscribe payloads over XMPP and Stomp.

Device state and MWI via PubSub in Asterisk

Asterisk, the well-known opensource telephony platform, integrates a feature (at the time of writing, waiting for testing) enabling to broadcast the device states and the MWI (Message Waiting Indicator), using the XMPP’s publish-and-subscribe mechanism.

Telepaatti

Telepaatti is IRC to Jabber/XMPP gateway compatible with MUC-protocol (Multi user chat). It allows you to join MUC-rooms and communicate with Jabber/XMPP users via your IRC client. Telepaatti acts as Jabber/XMPP client imitating IRC-server.

mod_ircd for Prosody

Matthew Wild has written mod_ircd, an IRC to MUC gateway for Prosody, which allows joining Jabber chatrooms using an IRC client.

Streaming Apple Events over XMPP

Dan Brickley has released a Ruby script that re-routes the Mac OS X Apple Remote event stream to XMPP.

Confbot: a Google Talk conference bot

Perry Lorier has written and released Confbot under the GPL license. It is a python bot that enables group chats to Gtalk (and XMPP) users. It has been written in the early days of Gtalk, back in 2005.

ejabberd_testing: automated testing for ejabberd modules

Eric Cestari has posted a short article on his blog, pointing to ejabberd_testing. The goal is is to be able to test ejabberd modules. It is released under the BSD license.

jctalk

Jongmyung Choi is coding the Smack-based jctalk instant messaging system that is able to monitor and control home appliances.

oai-pmh and xmpp

Interesting read, Ed Summers experiments with oai-pmh over XMPP, where he takes advantage of XMPP to push updates, instead of constantly polling them. For the record, oai-pmh stands for The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

Oslo Protocol

The Oslo protocol, released under a BSD license, describes a federated location sharing and proximity detection system, based on XMPP.

ejabberd webpresence plugin for jQuery

Mahlon E. Smith has released a jQuery plugin that shows a dynamic XMPP status badge, reflecting current presence information for a given XMPP account. Requires ejabberd’s mod_webpresence.

Musubi

Teruaki Gemmahas has developped Musubi, a Firefox extension using xmpp4moz, that lets you create online games and real-time apps in web pages.

OneWeb

ProcessOne has released OneWeb, an alpha Firefox extension (desktop and mobile), that lets you manage and share bookmarks between browsers, with interoperation with regular XMPP chat clients.

Jabber Feed 0.5

Jehan has announced Jabber Feed 0.5 WordPress plugin, that lets articles and comments be posted on PubSub.

This is it, this software Roundup is over. We hope you enjoyed discovering new software, or just being informed of new releases and features. You are encouraged to talk about this Roundup and/or the software mentionned here you care about in your blogs and microblogs, in order to promote XMPP technologies further.

Hey everyone!

Less than 3 weeks left until the XMPP Summit #8 comes to Brussels.

This year, we’ve got something new! Nokia has generously offered to sponsor a mobile XMPP developer challenge.

What does that mean?

Starting from NOW, you can start writing a mobile application for ANY Nokia platform (Maemo / S60v3 / S60v5 …).

The requirements are:

• The program must be FREELY available; OpenSource is preferred.
• The application needs to be demoed on a Nokia Phone (we have demo devices on location) on the XMPP Summit (Monday). If you are not attending the Summit, find someone who is, and can demo / explain the app, and collect the prize.
• Limit of 1 application per attendee.
• Substantially new code, as decreed on the day by the judges. (If you have questions, the judges will give guidance, but the final decision will be made on the day)
• Judges aren’t eligible.
• And of course: The application needs to use XMPP in some way.

The judges are: Jack Moffitt (XSF Board Chairman); Kevin Smith (XSF Council Chairman); Kristian Luoma (Nokia)

So what can I win?

We have one Nokia N900 generously sponsored by Nokia which the judges will hand over to the best application.

We will also have a second prize, whose winner is chosen by all the attendees (participants excluded). This prize consists of 2 XMPP books (XMPP: The Definitive Guide; Professional XMPP Programming with Javascript and Jquery) and an official XMPP T-Shirt.

So, open up those text editors and start coding, and good luck!

The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently accepting applications for new members. This application period will run until the end of January.

Why apply?

• Help the XSF with technical reviews and communication efforts
• Help elect the XMPP Council and XSF Board of Directors, or run for the Council yourself (council candidates must be XSF members)
• Help the XSF stay true to its mission of building an open, secure,
  feature-rich, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication
  and collaboration over the Internet

Application instructions are available at http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_January_2010

The application period ends on January 31, so take action today. :)

As the XMPP Roundup posts are growing longer each time we send one out, we’ve decided to split them into smaller posts, each covering a different aspect of XMPP news:

• Articles, talks and events
• Software
• Services
• Specifications

So, here is the first of the “Articles, talks and events” posts.

XMPP Roundup translations

The previous XMPP Roundup 12 has been translated into spanish thanks to naw and french thanks to Misc and Nÿco. If you can translate the Roundups into other languages, please do so.

GAEJ + XMPP and rolling your own Agent

Romin Irani, also author of the bloodbanklocator covered on the XMPP Roundup, has written an article on how to write an XMPP agent for GAEJ (Goole App Engine Java): “Episode 2 : GAEJ + XMPP and rolling your own Agent” and “Episode 2 : Update : Communicating to another XMPP Account via your Bot“. This is the second article in a series of four, the others are  more generally focused on GAEJ, and not specific to XMPP.

Realtime Blogging with IM and WordPress.com

“Realtime Blogging with IM and WordPress.com” is a video showing how to be notified in real-time of new blog posts and comments using the XMPP service that already has been covered on the XMPP Roundup.

XMPP and SIMPLE: A Comparative Study

Vinay has written an article comparing XMPP and SIMPLE, introducing both, describing their architectures, and of courses their strengths and weaknesses.

Really Real Time view to Twitter

Jebu Ittiachen has posted a screencast showing really real-time Twitter views. He used ejabberd, Strophe, and erlang, in order to get the Twitter stream and distribute it over XMPP and BOSH.

The Google Wave buzz

Google Wave, the new real-time communication tool, has seen a lot of buzz on the internet these days, here a quick collection of links:

• WaveSandbox.com: Federate This: announcing a federated instance of Google Wave, provided by Google
  
• Federate Google Wave sandbox with your own (FedOne) server. Here is the step-by-step guide and tutorial: the title speack for itself
  
• Novell Pulse: an announcement of a new product to be released in 2010, integrating Wave
  
• The Complete Guide to Google Wave: a book available on a Mediawiki as well as PDF and paper edition, under a CC by-sa license
  
• WaveBoard is both a Mac OS X and iPhone Wave client, based on a Safari SSB (Site-specific browser or Single-site browser)
• Google Wave Use Cases: Arts & Filmmaking: an interesting insight into the mass entertaining wrting methodologies impacts
  
• What is Google Wave and what it’s not: an outline of the tool as it is today
  
• Google Wave and XMPP ~ Beginning of Web 3.0: a short introduction
  
• Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D: Ars Technica investigates RPG as a use case
  
• What problems does Google Wave solve?: this articles lists the actual issues with today’s tools, and how they could be addressed by Wave
  
• Google Wave: Early Impressions
• The complete list of Google WaveGadgets, Robots and Servers

ProcessOne: Sea Beyond

ProcessOne has organized and run an event dubbed Sea Beyond, on real-time communications, in Paris.

Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc.

Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. is a non-profit organization whose goal is to support free instant messaging software. A primary purpose of the organization is to manage the affairs of Adium, Finch, Pidgin, Vulture and libpurple. The president is Sean Egan, the vice president Mark Doliner, the secretary Luke Schierer, the treasurer Ethan Blanton, and the directors are John Bailey, Evan Schoenberg, and Mark Spencer.

Beautiful XMPP Testing

Remko Tronçon, member of the XSF’s Council, has written a part of the book Beautiful Testing. He has put online this part, Beautiful XMPP Testing, as a PDF file.

Strategic Guide: Instant Messaging and Security

ProcessOne has released a Strategic Guide on Instant Messaging Security: it examines the real risks associated with instant messaging in corporate environments and explains how to mitigate them.

XMPP Is Not Bloated

Peter SaintAndre has reacted on his blog about usual allegations of the heaviness of XMPP.

Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery

Jack Moffitt, CTO of Collecta and member of the XSF Board of Directors, has written an XMPP book: Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery.

Real Time Web with XMPP

Once again, the very same Jack Moffitt gave a talk on XMPP JSConf 2009. The slides as well as the video ar available at InfoQ.

Diagram for XMPP connection

One of the most difficult part when developping a new XMPP client is the connection mechanism workflow. Tim Bielawa has drawn a state transitions diagram that might be very helpful to thousands of developpers worldwide.

hack-a-thon XMPP meetup

A “hack-a-thon XMPP meetup” has been held at 6:00pm on November 4th at the PariSoMa coworking space in San Francisco.

Gadu-Gadu transport

Mietek Bak has given a talk about the Gadu-Gadu transport he is developping, based on the libgadu library. Gadu-Gadu is a very successful proprietary IM system in Poland. The slides are available in PDF.

Final word

You are encouraged to point your microblog to this article, as well as translate it, or even expand one or more of these paragraphs into real articles.

Stay tuned for further parts of this Roundup on software, services, and specifications.

Once again the XSF will be combining one of our Summit meetings with attendance at FOSDEM in Brussels on the weekend of 6/7 February 2010.

We’ll have a devroom for half a day at FOSDEM (as we did last year – see here for some blog posts) and run the Summit around the FOSDEM weekend in a nearby Hotel. The current plan is to again hold a “hackfest” on Friday, have a free day at FOSDEM on Sunday, and then hold the official Summit on Monday.

If you’re thinking of attending the Summit and/or FOSDEM, please mark this long-weekend in your diary. We will post further information as it become available.

[Reporter: Nicolas Vérité, assisted by Peter Saint-Andre]

This Roundup is the third “almost-monthly” review of the XMPP-sphere this summer. It shows again a lot of activity as you can see through these pointers to articles, software, services, and of course specifications, the core of our work here at the XSF.

Articles

XMPP web project walk-through
Boris Okner describes a weather web application using ejabberd and strophe over BOSH. You can play with the demo (username: shared, password: shared).

Scalable XMPP bots with erlang and exmpp
ProcessOne has published a series of articles on how to build bots on top of the exmpp library (in Erlang). These come in three parts: part I, part II and part III.

Meet the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
IBM developerWorks has published an article by Tim Jones introducing XMPP as a multipurpose instant messaging architecture that is not only suited for chat applications. There is an example in Ruby using the xmpp4r library.

XMPP powering the “internet of things”?
A few “internet of things” (or “IoT”) projects are using XMPP as a communication layer: this could well show an area of development for XMPP.

New and updated software

Psi 0.13
The verson 0.13 of Psi, the well-known free software Jabber client, has been released by Justin Karneges on the 28th of July. Sorry for that miss on the previous Roundup. The main new feature a top-requested one: Jingle voice! A few days later, Justin announced the 0.14 plan, you can read the interesting follow-up.

Pidgin 2.6
In yet another big advance for Jingle, the Pidgin team has released the version 2.6 of this multi-protocol IM client, with Jingle voice and video for Linux and Mac OS X. Support for Jingle file transfer is also on the way.

Silent Diving Seagulls
Silent Diving Seagulls is a multi-platform Firefox extension for desktop notifications. It is based on xmpp4moz. This article also points to Yapper, an XMPP interface for the Growl notifier (for Mac OS X).

WideNoise
WideNoise is an iPhone application using XMPP and OpenSpime to track noise: it will display decibel levels in maps.

ejabberd 2.1.0 beta
ejabberd has been released in version 2.1 beta1, beta 2, and rc1 for testing purposes, providing a lot of PubSub improvements, and an experimental STUN server for NAT traversal.

eewdata
eewdata is a simple Perl module for the Japanese Earthquake Early Warning, that has an XMPP example for real-time notification.

Sixties
Clochix has extended the opensource library XMPPHP, which now talks PubSub (plus Jabber Search and Ad-Hoc Commands), under the GPL license of course, and the name Sixties (related to XEP-0060). You can read this in a mention on this blog post in French.

XMPP on Google App Engine
Google has released the version 1.2.5 of their Java and Python SDK for the App Engine (or GAE), including in fact most current XMPP features.

Orbited
Orbited is a Python library published under the MIT license, for real-time communication in the browser, including support for XMPP, IRC, and STOMP (ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ).

SocialVPN
SocialVPN is a free and open-source P2P Social Virtual Private Network (VPN). It integrates social networking and peer-to-peer networking to create a VPN. SocialVPN has XMPP as a backend.

Tinder 1.1.0
Guus der Kinderen has announced the version 1.1.0 of the Tinder XMPP library fixing concurrency (threading) issues and other bugs.

ejabberd migration kit
ejabberd 2.1.0 supports XEP-0227, a.k.a. PIEFXIS for Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers.

New and updated services

Data synchro from Google
Google has announced that data synchronization from the browser is done through XMPP in their Chrome browser. Opera Link and Mozilla Weave provide the same feature, but do not rely on XMPP (yet!).

Switchub
Switchub is a service for push notifications, using web hooks and XMPP. For now it is only available on invite.

Dispatch.io
Dispatch.io is a notification service for Growl using XMPP.

Shion
Audacious Software has released Shion, a home automation software for Mac OS X, that lets you remotely control and monitor your devices and appliances.

JabberHooks
JabberHooks lets you receive XMPP messages via HTTP POST (aka webhooks).

PubSubHubbub to XMPP gateway
Matt Mastracci has released a PubSubHubbub to XMPP gateway on appspot.

Mumbai Blood Bank Locator Agent
The Blood Bank Locator bot is a small XMPP application written for and running on the Google App Engine, that enables you to locate blood banks in different areas in Mumbai.

New and updated specs

XMPP Relay Nodes
XMPP relay nodes are a technology that grew out of discussions at the XMPP Summit in Brussels earlier this year. They are much like supernodes in Skype, but slightly better: any XMPP client can become a relay peer for the rest of a P2P Jingle network, typically on an opt-in basis (e.g., anyone in your buddy list can borrow some of your bandwidth). This has not been proposed as an official XSF “XEP” yet.

Linked Process
Linked Process is a specification and an implementation aiming at machine communication. It will probably be proposed as an official XEP soon.

XMPP for cloud computing in bioinformatics
XMPP for cloud computing in bioinformatics.

The XMPP community has also worked hard on the following specs recently:

• Over at the IETF’s XMPP Working Group, version 02 of draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis has been released, including an updated description of the ACTive architecture used in XMPP.
• The XMPP Council has advanced both XEP-0202: Entity Time and XEP-0203 (Delayed Delivery) from Draft to Final in the XSF’s standards process.
• There are Last Calls in progress on XEP-0227: Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers, XEP-0244: IO Data, and XEP-0270: XMPP Compliance Suites 2010.
• The XMPP Council has approved some small “maintenance” fixes to XEP-0080: User Location, XEP-0256: Last Activity in Presence, XEP-0055: Jabber Search, XEP-0077: In-Band Registration (with some fixes to XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications and XEP-0136: Message Archiving on the way).
• Three new Experimental specifications have been published: XEP-0272: Multiparty Jingle (Muji), XEP-0273 Stanza Interception and Filtering Technology (SIFT), and XEP-0274: Design Considerations for Digital Signatures in XMPP.

Conclusion

It has been a busy summer for XMPP:

• With so much happening, it becomes difficult to keep track of XMPP-related news! If you would like to help, please ping me at nyco@jabber.fr or join the jabber@conference.jabber.org chatroom (you can even join it via the web here).
• XMPP is becoming more and more ubiquitous. It seems that developers everywhere appreciate many of its features and qualities, like openness, presence and IM, federation, push, request-response messaging, and so on…

Since 2006 the XMPP Standards Foundation has been offering free digital certificates to administrators of XMPP servers as a way of encouraging encryption of point-to-point “hops” on the XMPP network. This program has been successful in several ways:

• Thousands of XMPP deployments currently use certificates issued by the XMPP ICA.
• Popular XMPP clients and servers have fixed bugs in their code related to certificate handling.
• The XMPP community has gained practical experience with stronger encryption.

Since the beginning, the XSF has functioned as an “intermediate certification authority” or “ICA”, where the root CA is StartCom. In collaboration with our friends at StartCom, we recently decided that StartCom will directly offer Class 1 certificates through its normal process at http://www.startssl.com/ instead of running a specialized service only for XMPP servers at xmpp.net. This lowers the administrative burden both for the XSF (we will no longer need to manually approve certain certificate requests) and for StartCom (they will be able to use the same code for issuing both web server certificates and IM server certificates).

We have always seen our arrangement with StartCom as something of an experiment. Although there were many good reasons for choosing StartCom as our partner in offering free certificates (they enabled us to run an intermediate CA, they have great customer service, and the price was extremely competitive), that partnership was never exclusive. We have hoped that StartCom’s example would encourage other CAs to offer XMPP-specific certificates as well. Although that has not happened yet, modifying our relationship with StartCom is a movement in that direction because their issuance of XMPP-specific certificates is now part of their “mainstream” offerings.

The XSF will continue to issue and honor certificates via the XMPP ICA for a few more months, but StartCom is hard at work on upgrading their core service to directly offer XMPP certificates at their own site, so expect a switchover sometime in the relatively near future. We will keep you up to date at this blog and at xmpp.net regarding any service issues.

Finally, we would like to thank Eddy Nigg and his team at StartCom for all their hard work over the years. They are true security professionals and a pleasure to work with. We certainly hope that our paths cross again in the future.

Once a year, the XMPP Standards Foundation holds elections for its Board of Directors and for the XMPP Council. That time is now, so the XSF is actively soliciting people to stand for election. Here is the division of responsibilities between the two groups:

1. The Board provides business leadership for the XSF by handling things like fundraising, contracts, grants, legal issues, planning the XMPP Summit meetings, and choosing volunteers for various official posts such as the Secretary and Executive Director. Those who serve on the Board are not required to be elected members of the XSF.

2. The Council provides technical leadership for the XSF by managing the XSF’s standards process, deciding which proposals to accept as official XEPs, voting on advancement of XEPs through the process from Experimental to Draft to Final, and providing oversight for the functions of the XMPP Extensions Editor and the XMPP Registrar. Those who serve on the XMPP Council are required to be elected members of the XSF.

If you are interested in standing for election, please visit http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Board_and_Council_Elections_2009 and create a page about your candidacy by the close of business on Friday, September 11, 2009.

[Reporters: Nicolas Vérité and Peter Saint-Andre]

Welcome to the eleventh XMPP roundup, the summer news of the XMPP galaxy.

New and updated software

Blather

Blather is a library for Ruby, licensed under a BSD licence.

dojox

dojox, is an XMPP library for JavaScript that is part of the Dojo toolkit.

Eiffel

Eiffel XMPP, a library for the Eiffel language, inspired by XMPPHP, published under the Eiffel Forum License v2.

eM Client

eM Client is PIM client (Personal Information Manager: e-mail, calendar, contact, etc.), for Windows only (XP and Vista), integrating XMPP.

glu

glu is a Windows-only XMPP client, written on the .Net framework, with agsxmpp library, released under the GPLv2 license.

hxmpp

hxmpp is a library for the haXe language for client and components (with no license yet).

SworIM

SworIM, a native XMPP client for the iPhone.

Tinder

Tinder is an XMPP library for Java coming from Openfire and Whack.

V&V Messenger

V&V Messenger is a Windows-only XMPP client (screenshots).

OneTeam 3.0 for iPhone

The XMPP client OneTeam 3.0 for iPhone has got the Apple Push, based on XMPP.

Pandion

Pandion, the XMPP client, is now released as an opensource software, under the GPLv3 license.

Prosody

Version 0.5 of the Prosody XMPP server has been released.

XMPP4R

XMPP4R has been released in version 0.5, with many improvements and bugfixes.

New and updated services based on XMPP

Jake

Jake is a collaborative file sharing service based on XMPP.

PyGo Wave Server

PyGo Wave Server is available.

Wave on ejabberd

ProcessOne has posted a blog article detailing how to configure ejabberd for the Wave reference implementation.

Collecta

Collecta is a real-time search engine.

superfeedr.com

superfeedr.com is real-time feed parsing, using PubSub for notifications.

Weavver testing tool

Weavver testing tool is an XMPP tool to check SRV records and TCP ports.

Juick

juick.com is a new real-time social network and microblogging site, based on Jabber/XMPP, letting you publish notices, tunes, photos, geolocation, mood, vCard, etc.

New and updated XMPP specifications

The XMPP Standards Foundation has advanced both XEP-0198: Stream Management and XEP-0249: Direct MUC Invitations from Experimental to Draft in its standards process. In addition, the following specifications have been recently updated:

• XEP-0051: Connection Transfer: version 0.2
• XEP-0220: Server Dialback: version 0.4
• XEP-0258: Security Labels in XMPP: version 0.4
• XEP-0260: Jingle SOCKS5 Bytestreams Transport Method: version 0.3
• XEP-0271: XMPP Nodes: version 0.1

Conclusion

There is no rest in the XMPP space: even in the summer, things are going on at a fast pace.