Extended Conversation

We started with Bear and Joe giving a brief welcome and then we went around the room and alloed the attendees to introduce themselves. After the introductions we worked out the Agenda using the barcamp style of posting topics to the white-board and haggling over which order to work thru them.

Since the focus turned out to be almost all interop testing the group set up infrastructure with Jack E. helped by setting up a local CA Server and Joe setting up both DNS and DHCP while the great guys from &yet provided network hubs and patch cables. This allowed our testing to be done all on a private network, using example.com as our base DNS domain.

Once the servers were up and running, we then retrieved the appropriate certificates that Jack E. had created and installed them into each server. This took longer than expected, as getting each server/OS to import the CA certificate to the appropriate trust store was troublesome.

Once basic private network features were up and each server being tested was online, we then tried to login to each server with PSI and Gajim (they just happened to be the most prevalent multi-account supporting clients we all had) and then moved on to testing BOSH and CORS. BOSH setup and testing continued until the break for lunch.

While some folks were getting BOSH testing working (i.e. once Bear finally learned how to read the Prosody docs!) Jack was also checking that S2S unencrypted connections between the servers that were ready to test was correct at the wire level. He spent a lot of time in wireshark!

After lunch we had short presentations from Joe on some of the new XEP’s he would like to see worked on (especially Carbons, XEP-0280) and then we had some demos of &yet’s browser-based client , DragonForce and OneSocialWeb.

(editor’s note: apologies for this appearing now, it got stuck in the publish queue and I did not notice it until I went to publish the Day One Summary that follows. d’oh!)

Next week (July 19th and 20th 2010) the XSF will be having the 9th XMPP Summit at the Oregon Convention Center courtesy of the great folks at O’Reilly who allow us to take over a room during OSCON.

Details can be found on the wiki page.

As in prior years, one of the primary focuses will be an Introduction to XMPP session for anyone wishing to learn (or improve) their XMPP knowledge. One of the primary goals this session will be to perform some client/server interop testing but other break-out sessions always pop up as folks start to get together.

If your going to OSCON 2010, or are in the area, please do stop by.

The XSF held another successful XMPP Summit over the weekend at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Many thanks to the companies who sponsored this event: Nokia, Vodafone, Collabora, Isode, TANDBERG, Buddycloud, Collecta, and Ooros. Special thanks to Nokia for temporarily donating some N900 devices for the Developer Challenge, and to Mobile Vikings for the SIM cards that enabled a number of XMPP developers to experiment with building mobile applications at the conference. And extra special thanks to XSF Board member Florian Jensen for his hard work on local coordination (as well as the photos in this blog post).

The weekend events started with a “hackfest” on Friday where developers could work together on code projects, perform interoperability testing, and give informal talks on technical topics.

On Saturday we had a “devroom” at FOSDEM 2010, which was packed the entire afternoon.

One of the most popular sessions was “Stump the XMPP Experts” with XMPP book authors and the current XMPP Council (left to right, the experts were Kevin Smith, Ralph Meijer, Remko Tronçon, Matthew Wild, Jack Moffitt, Dave Cridland, and Peter Saint-Andre).

The talks ranged from fun demos to technical explorations of XMPP technologies. Here Ralph Meijer illustrates the use of Atom feeds over XMPP pubsub (photo by Dan Brickley).

Other speakers included the winners of the XMPP developer challenge, Frank Scholz and Philippe Normand, who gave a talk about their Mirabeau application for personal media networks.

On both Saturday and Sunday the XSF had a booth at FOSDEM, which was the center of many ad-hoc discussions.

We had a new T-shirt design especially for the event, here donned along with an older Jabber shirt and last year’s XMPP design by Sebastiaan Deckers of the Pandion project, Joe Hildebrand of Cisco, XSF Board member Florian Jensen, and XMPP Council member Ralph Meijer.

As usual, one of the highlights of the weekend was the official XSF dinner, where participants got a chance to know each other better over some excellent Belgian food.

Finally, on Monday we held the Summit itself, with in-depth discussions and brainstorming sessions about technical challenges facing the XMPP developer community. The hot topics this year included:

• Mobile Optimizations. Here there was general agreement that we need to experiment further with some of the technologies we defined at past Summits (including Roster Versioning and SIFT), more fully specify methods for session resumption and quick reconnect, and perhaps define a straightforward method for “hushing” a session to turn off incoming presence notifications. Expect follow-up discussion on the mobile@xmpp.org list.
• Network Reliability. Here again the participants concluded that we need more implementation and deployment experience with existing extensions, especially stanza acknowledgements and message receipts, so that we can see what reliability gaps remain once those are more widely deployed.
• Server-to-Server Security. We had a wide-ranging discussion about Domain Name Assertions, a proposal being worked on within the IETF’s XMPP Working Group that would enable XMPP hosting services to deploy SSL/TLS without having access to the private keys for the domains they host. One result of the discussion was agreement to further explore attribute certificates as the most secure method for this feature. Another was to probably define a new DNS SRV record for delegated services; for example, _xmpp-delegate._tcp.example.com might point to google.com, dreamhost.com, gmx.com, cisco.com, i-pobox.net, or some other hosting provider so that a connecting user or server would know that it’s OK to connect to the hosting provider securely. These topics will be discussed on the xmpp@ietf.org list.
• Jingle. There was quite a bit of excitement about Thiago Camargo’s proposal for Jingle Relay Nodes, which will make it easier to realistically deploy Jingle services for voice, video, and other multimedia use cases. Sign up for the jingle@xmpp.org list to discuss.
• Multi-User Chat (“MUC”). Although this is one of the oldest and most widely-used XMPP extensions (powering everything from IETF chatrooms to replacements for IRC in military applications), further improvements are on the way. Summit participants discussed a more flexible model for user roles (provisionally called “hats”), the ability to share and subscribe metadata about the room and its occupants, the use of MUC as a control channel for voice and video conferences (i.e., Multiparty Jingle), distribution of MUC rooms across servers, and several other topics. We’re sure to have much discussion about these topics over the weeks and months ahead on the muc@xmpp.org and standards@xmpp.org lists.

As in years past, it was extremely beneficial to gather active members of the XMPP developer community together for coding, outreach, and in-depth technical discussion. The success of this year’s Summit is already inspiring developers to work on smaller-scale events around the world, and to plan for XMPP Summit #9 in North America this summer. Stay tuned for details.

–stpeter

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!

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.

David Banes is hoping to get some XMPP Meetups going in Australia. Looking at Sydney to start with and Melbourne next.

Register at Meetup.com if you’re interested.

http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-XMPP-Meetup/

Mark your calendars! Thanks to the generosity of O’Reilly, the seventh XMPP Summit will be held at the premises of OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California, on July 20-21, 2009. Details to follow.

Those who attended FOSDEM would have seen Dave Cridland typing furiously during the day’s other XMPP talks when everyone else was paying attention to the speakers. Some might have assumed that this was because Dave hadn’t written his presentation until the day he was due to give it. Dave assures me however that he was ‘rewriting’ the presentation to take account of the lack of internet connectivity which crippled his plans for application demos.

"Rewriting"

Dave’s Presentation is available here in PDF format. The PDF is in two parts, Pages 1-19 are the slides themselves but as these make little sense without the accompanying talk, pages 20-38 contain the slides and Dave’s notes on his own talk.

Information Flow in XMPP Clients

In his talk at FOSDEM this year Florian Jensen, CTO and co-founder of Flosoft, talked about the challenges involved in setting up and administering a large scale XMPP deployment. Forian’s slides are available in PDF format here

Florian Jensen @ FOSDEM 2009

Florian’s own entertaining description of his adventures at FOSDEM can be found on his blog.

XMPP isn’t just about instant messaging – in his talk at FOSDEM, Dirk Meyer explored how XMPP can form the basis of a powerful, yet secure, Personal Media Network – allowing access to your music collection from wherever you are, playing your videos on your friend’s TV, and seemlessly integrating your personal collection with global media. 

Dirk’s Presentation is available in PDF format here.

Dirk Meyer @ FOSDEM 2009