Extended Conversation

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.

[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…

[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.

[Reporters: Nicolas Vérité and Peter Saint-Andre]

For those who love round numbers, welcome to the tenth edition of the XMPP Roundup, our semi-regular review of news and events in the XMPP community. Since our last roundup on May 11, here’s what’s been happening…

Software

Google Wave

Google has announced the existence of Google Wave, an early-stage technology for real-time interaction that will incorporate aspects of IM, email, wikis, and other collaboration techniques. The technology for federating different Wave instances is pure XMPP, so the developer community is watching this project quite closely.

Minbif

Minbif is an IRC gateway to IM networks which lets the user connect to Jabber (and many proprietary legacy IM systems), through IRC command lines. It is release under the GPLv2 license, in version 1.0alpha as the time of this writing.

Utterance

Nolan Darilek has announced the development of Utterance, an XMPP microblog transport, written in Ruby under a BSD license.

modular_muc

Eric Cestari wrote a Multi-User Chat (MUC) module in ejabberd that is as modular as the PubSub module.

exmpp

ProcessOne has launched its exmpp Erlang XMPP library under the Erlang Public License (EPL), in its newly opened Labs.

Hemlock

Hemlock is an opensource soon-to-be-released Flash XMPP framework.

Services

Ask me

http://askme.im/ has a set of XMPP bots that cover quotes, jokes, movie reviews, stock prices and daliy horoscopes, and much more…

Jabbim’s URL shorting service

Jabbim community has released a new URL shortening service at xmpp:shorty@jabbim.com: just add it to your roster and start chatting.

Community

Members of the XMPP community have started work on two new initiatives: an open framework for XMPP protocol testing and a website for information about the XMPP network. To participate, join the interop@xmpp.org discussion list or the operators@xmpp.org discussion list, respectively. Expect to see more work on these projects in the coming months!

Protocols

The big news here is that the core Jingle specifications have finally advanced from Experimental to Draft status (version 1.0)! We’ll post more about this in the near future. The specs that have moved forward are:

• XEP-0166: Jingle
• XEP-0167: Jingle RTP Sessions
• XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP Transport Method
• XEP-0177: Jingle Raw UDP Transport Method

Another important specification to advance from Experimental to Draft is Roster Versioning. This technology will make it much more efficient for IM clients to log into XMPP servers, since the server can inform the client if the user’s contact list has not changed since the client last logged in (or send a small diff if it has changed). This is especially important in mobile applications such as cell phones and PDAs. The roster versioning technology is one of the mobile optimizations we are working on, and will be incorporated into the revisions to RFC 3921 within the IETF’s newly re-formed XMPP Working Group.

In addition, the XMPP Council has been working to advance more XEPs from Draft to Final. The latest specification to be so honored are:

• XEP-0138: Stream Compression
• XEP-0199: XMPP Ping

Finally, the Council has also been performing some “spring cleaning” by officially obsoleting XEP-0003: Proxy Accept Socket Service, XEP-0011: Jabber Browsing, XEP-0022: Message Events, XEP-0023: Message Expiration, XEP-0025: Jabber HTTP Polling, XEP-0090: Legacy Entity Time, and XEP-0091: Legacy Delayed Delivery.

Conclusion

Again, 2009 seems to be a very active year for XMPP technologies.

[Reporters: Nicolas Vérité and Peter Saint-Andre]

Welcome to the 9th edition of the XMPP Roundup, the periodic stream of news and events in the XMPP universe.

New and updated software

Wokkel 0.6.0

Ralph Meijer has announced Wokkel 0.6.0, a set of XMPP tools on top of the Python Twisted framework.

PySoy game engine

PySoy is a 3d game engine including networking support being based around XMPP for player chat and server discovering, Jingle ICE-UDP for network games. It is released under the AGPLv3 license.

XMPPLogger

XMPPLogger is a small Perl utility written under the BSD license that listens on a FIFO and sends every line to the given XMPP/Jabber account(s).

Mojo Messaging Service: PubSub by Palm

In a article titled “Palm to Introduce Push Services“, pre central notes:

When the Mojo SDK is broadly released later this year, it will include a developer-facing offering called the Mojo Messaging Service, an XMPP publish/subscribe service. The Mojo Messaging Service is an elegant, standards-based way to exchange information over the Internet. When new information is available, it is “published” to the cloud and all interested parties who are subscribers are notified that new information is available. This will allow developers to push live content to their applications or services. The Mojo Messaging Service initially will have a limited feature set and service level that will evolve over time.

xBookmarks addon for Firefox

xBookmarks stands for “XMPP bookmarks”, it is a Firefox extension that implements XEP-0048 so that a user having an XMPP account can store all of his bookmarks in one place and can retrieve them from anywhere. xBookmarks needs xmpp4moz.

Babylon

Babylon is a Ruby framework for XMPP applications, written under the MIT license and currently available in a “pre-0.1″ version.

Services

WordPress.com’s firehose

WordPress.com, a hosting service for WordPress blogs (this blog is using WordPress), has launched Firehose, a private, commercial stream service for blog posts and comments:

The WordPress.com firehose is designed for partners like search engines and market intelligence providers who would like to ingest a real-time stream of new WordPress.com posts and comments the second they get published. The firehose is XMPP based and can be accessed s2s (server-to-server) or c2s (client-to-server).

File transfer proxy at jabber.org

The jabber.org XMPP service has gained a SOCKS5 file transfer proxy, it is located at proxy.eu.jabber.org.

WeFeelFine

wefeelfine@jabber.spektral.at is a Jabber bot that seeks the feeling expressed in blogs worldwide. More information on the blog post.

Articles

What Can You Do with XMPP?

Kathryn Barrett from O’Reilly, has written a lengthy article on the book XTDG, aka XMPP: The Definitive Guide by Peter Saint-Andre, Kevin Smith, and Remko Tronçon, detailing a large range of the features and possible applications of XMPP.

Specifications

Since the last XMPP Roundup, several specifications published by the XMPP Standards Foundation have evolved:

• XEP-0256: Last Activity in Presence has advanced from Experimental to Draft
• XEP-0237: Roster Versioning has been updated to reflect feedback receiving during Last Call, and a second Last Call has been issued before advancing it from Experimental to Draft
• XEP-0124: Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH) was updated to correct the XML schema and incorporate technical discussions held at XMPP Summit 6 in February
• XEP-0267: Server Rosters and XEP-0268: Incident Reporting were published, also as a result of discussions held at XMPP Summit 6 in February
• XEP-0266: Codecs for Jingle RTP Sessions was updated with information about the Dirac codec for video
• XEP-0238: XMPP Protocol Flows for Inter-Domain Federation and XEP-0154: User Profile have been deferred because of inactivity

A final word

XMPP’s ubiquity shows even more after months pass.

[Reporters: Nicolas Vérité and Peter Saint-Andre]

Welcome the 8th wonder^Wroundup of the XMPP world.

Contributions are welcome for next edition! Stop in the jabber@conference.jabber.org chatroom if you have suggestions (you can even join via web chat here).

Articles, Events and Talks

“Les Jeudis du Libre” in Lyon, France

Grégoire Ménuel, aka Omega, XSF member, has presented an introduction to XMPP at the event “Les Jeudis du Libre” (“the thursdays of free software”) in Lyon (France). It took place on the 5th of february, for the french LUG ALDIL (Association Lyonnaise pour le Développement de l’Informatique Libre). His slides are available in PDF format (720 Ko, 24 pages).

XMPP and interoperability

Nicolas Vérité aka Nÿco, XSF member, gave a talk on XMPP and interoperability at Solutions Linux 2009 event, the slides are available on SlideShare.

New Software and Services

Identichat: a personal MUC for microblogging

Identichat is a Jabber/XMPP MUC interface to Identi.ca/Laconica microblogging platform. Jean-Marc Liotier has blogged an article about it.

MatriX

MatriX is a proprietary XMPP SDK written in C# by AG Software for the .NET/Mono platforms. Demos require Silverlight 2.0.

Galaxium multiprotocol IM client

Galaxium Messenger is a GNOME multiprotocol instant messaging application for XMPP and IRC plus proprietary protocols. It is released under the GPLv2 license, and is written in C# for .Net/Mono.

Switchvox’s SMB 4.0 adds unified presence with XMPP

VoIPPlanet reports that Switchvox has released SMB 4.0, its unifed communications platform. It features “unified presence”, which is based on XMPP (see Switchvox Manual).

PEtALS ESB has XMPP

PEtALS, the opensource ESB from OW2, has an XMPP Binding Component, supporting sending and receiving messages, and sending files.

Swift

Swift is a future XMPP opensource client, made by Remko Tronçon and Kevin Smith, with a Qt-based GUI, for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

Afflux web client

Afflux is a web-based XMPP client made by François de Metz and Pierrick Vignand, released under the GPLv3 license.

Drop.io adds XMPP

The web-based file swapping service drop.io has added MUC chatroom features for each “drop”. Jack Moffitt blogged about it.

Neuros OSD embeds XMPP

Neuros Technology’s OSD product (home video device) has an “unified client gateway to the XMPP network”.

Synapse for Linux

Synapse Instant Messenger is an attractive, featureful XMPP client by Eric Butler. It is still alpha software, written in C# for Mono for Linux, and released under the GPLv3 license.

UDDI over IO-DATA (over XMPP)

IO-DATA is a protocol extension on top of the XMPP that enables machine-to-machine communication. UDDI OASIS Standard (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) defines a universal method for enterprises to dynamically discover and invoke Web services. The Taverna project has implemented XMPP-based web/cloud services using these technologies.

More web services with IO-DATA

Developer Tuomas Koski has been experimenting with more uses of IO-DATA for web services at his site lobstermonster.org. The folks on the WS-XMPP discussion list were quite impressed with some of his applications, described here and here.

Personalised Track Notifications over XMPP

BBC Radio Labs has released the bot xmpp:radio1@hug.hellomatty.com, which will ping a user when one of the BBC music stations is playing a tune by an artist the user likes. The user simply has to send the message lastfm lastfmusername.

Jabiru: XMPP client for Android

Jabiru is free jabber client for Google Android platform, released in version 1.0 in March, and constantly updated since.

Concordance: Python 3 framework

Concordance is an XMPP service framework for Python 3.0 (still alpha but under heavy development).

TOXTOX

TOXTOX is an innovative web browser for your television, with built-in XMPP support for “social browsing”.

Jabbear

Jabbear is a new, user-friendly IM client based on XMPP.

Present.ly and XMPP

The present.ly microblogging service makes heavy use of XMPP in its backend architecture.

MU-Conference 0.8

Grégoire Ménuel aka omega, has released version 0.8 of MU-Conference the free software component for Multi-User Chat.

Business Chat with TioLive

The new Business Chat service from TioLive is all based on XMPP (using the ejabberd server).

Yambi

A new XMPP/Jingle client is available from Yambi.

XMPP gateway in MS LCS

Alfonso Castro, director of interoperability strategy at Microsoft, announced at Solutions Linux 2009 that Live Communication Server, Microsoft’s presence and instant messaging product, will have an XMPP gateway in the future.

Live Baseball Chat

Fans of both XMPP and American baseball were happy to learn that livebaseballchat.com is a new XMPP-based service for real-time chat about baseball games as they happen.

Bots to the rescue!

Internet Relay Chat “bots” (which provide helpful services in IRC channels) are starting to migrate over to XMPP multi-user chat (MUC) rooms. A good example is Gozerbot.

Ohloh goes live

Journal entries from the Ohloh project management service can be automatically shared over XMPP.

Apache Vysper

Some developers associated with the Apache community have started work on Vysper, which aims to be a complete XMPP server implementation.

Orkut got XMPP

The Orkut social networking service recently added XMPP support.

Specifications

The XMPP Standards Foundation has been busy finalizing a number of items on its roadmap. Here is a brief summary:

The core specifications underlying the XMPP Jingle technology are very close to being done, and are currently in “Last Call” within the XSF’s standards process. The specifications in question are Jingle, Jingle RTP Sessions, Jingle ICE-UDP Transport Method, and Jingle Raw UDP Transport Method. Once these specifications advance to Draft, expect to see more Jingle implementations as well as further progress on other Jingle-related technologies (e.g., file transfer).

Another area of focus right now is improved reliability and traffic optimization for mobile applications of XMPP. There are two technologies being developed to address these issues: stream management (which provides acks and reliable delivery of XMPP stanzas) and roster versioning (which removes the need to download the complete XMPP roster each time a client logs in). The XMPP developer community appears to have consensus on these improvements, so look for them to be implemented and deployed in the relatively near future.

In addition, members of the XMPP developer community held a successful “Birds of a Feather” session at the most recent meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force as a means of jump-starting work to finalize the improvements to the XMPP RFCs, which define the very core of XMPP. If an XMPP Working Group is approved, it will also work on some security enhancements to XMPP as well as adjustments to server-to-server communication for increased scalability. We will be reporting on this work more fully in the coming months.

Conclusion

2009 continues to be a very busy year for XMPP development, implementation, and deployment. So busy that it is difficult to find people who can report on everything that is happening! However, we will endeavor to publish “XMPP Roundup #9″ before too much more time goes by.

[Reporter: Peter Saint-Andre]

Before the memories of XMPP Summit 6 fade away, I wanted to provide a brief report on the latest and greatest of our “IRL” (in real life) meetings.

We held the first XMPP Summit in the summer of 2005 to perform server interop testing and discuss topics of interest. Thirteen developers showed up and we made good progress on a number of issues, including the pubsub simplifications now known as Personal Eventing Protocol.

Fast forward to 2009 for the sixth summit, where over 40 developers participated — so many that we needed to split up into smaller discussion groups to complete some serious work. During the official XMPP Summit day (Monday the 9th) we had formal or informal break-out groups about mobile optimizations, BOSH, pubsub, operational challenges, Jingle, security, and several other topics. As a result we came up with clear action items to work on regarding a number of XMPP technologies, some of which have already been completed and others of which are underway. Expect the remaining items to be mostly finished in the next few weeks.

The one-day XMPP Summit was not the only activity in Brussels. We got started on Friday the 6th with a “Jingle Thingle”, which was similar in format to the very first Summit by including both interop testing and discussion. Voice and video calls were completed and we talked about the use of Jingle for both file transfer and end-to-end encryption, resulting in Jingle “profiles” of both SOCKS5 Bytestreams and In-Band Bytestreams as well as a promising proposal for encryption of XMPP traffic. This event helped us get much closer to stabilizing Jingle and advancing the core specifications to a status of Draft in our standards process, which should happen in the very near future.

Saturday the 7th and Sunday the 8th were outreach days at FOSDEM, one of the largest open-source conferences in Europe. On Saturday the XMPP community had a “devroom” from 1 PM to 7 PM, where we presented numerous talks and tutorials about XMPP technologies (thanks to everyone who volunteered to speak). The room held 75 people but it was overflowing almost the entire time! On both Saturday and Sunday we also had a hallway stand where we spread the word and sold out of our first-ever batch of XMPP T-shirts.

Keeping with tradition, on Sunday evening we held an XMPP dinner so that developers could get to know each other on a more personal level. At Summits past the XMPP Standards Foundation has paid for the dinner, but this year we took a more flexible approach by asking individuals and companies to chip in toward the cost. Many thanks to Nokia, Isode, StanzIQ, bluendo, AG-Software, Flosoft.biz, Thomas Koeppen, and several other individuals for helping to defray the costs. Special thanks go out to Florian Jensen of Flosoft.biz for acting as our “man on the ground” in Brussels to help coordinate with the restaurant as well as the hotel where we held the Jingle Thingle and XMPP Summit.

Our in-person conferences continue to grow in popularity and we’re already looking forward to XMPP Summit 7 in North America this summer (exact dates and location yet to be announced). The energy in the XMPP community is palpable, so expect more good things in the months ahead as our work in Brussels bears fruit.

Onward and upward!

Foreword

Welcome to the 6th roundup of the XMPP community worldwide.

This edition has been written by Nicolas Vérité with contributions from Will Sheward, Cédric, and Mickaël Rémond. Contributions are welcome for future editions.

Mats Bengtsson passed away

It is with great regret that we learned though Mari Lundberg and Sander Devrieze, that Mats Bengtsson, lead developper of the Coccinella XMPP client, passed away in november 2008. Rest in peace Mats.

10 years of Jabber

Jehan is hosting an event celebrating 10 years of Jabber and has issued a call for sponsors and papers. The event will take place at Carrefour Numérique in Paris, France, on Saturday, the 28th of February.

Talks and articles

Social networks based on XMPP

At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, Jan Torben gave a talk on “Privacy in the social semantic web : Social networks based on XMPP”, the slides are available in PDF format.

Low bandwidth XMPP

Isode has released a whitepaper dealing with “Operating XMPP over Radio and Satellite Networks“, or constrained and low-bandwidth links. They gave a talk on this subject at the High Frequency Industry Association meeting in San Diego last week. Slides are available in PDF format from Isode’s blog.

Introduction to Jingle

Peter Saint-Andre has written an article in Unified Communications Magazine, entitled “Give me a Jingle (It’s a Multi-Protocol World)” presenting Jingle to SIP people.

Real-time trading system

Though we have almost no information, Artur Hefczyc chatted with someone developping a real-time trading system in which Tigase XMPP Server is the critical messaging piece, another piece of evidence that XMPP is widely used as a secret competitive advantage in many companies.

Developing a lingua franca for instant messaging

David Banes has written an article for IDM Magazine, entitled “Developing a lingua franca for instant messaging” (PDF), comparing e-mail ten years ago to IM today.

Pidgin user survey

Pidgin develoment team has released the results of its user survey: though it’s focused on Piding only, some figures are very interesting.

Push technologies

Zac has put online a good explanation of push technologies, in an 8 minutes video, using pen+paper presentation technologies.

XMPP/Jabber presentation in Toulouse, France

Simon Chemouil et Geoffroy Youri presented XMPP/Jabber, on wednesday 21st of Januray, at Toulouse, France. Toulibre is the LUG that hosted the event, the video is available for download in Ogg Theora (666 MB, 2h27), and the slides in PDF: part 1 and part 2.

Services and software

idsoftware’s Quakelive uses XMPP

ProcessOne reports that Quakelive, idsoftware’s new online first-person shooter game, is using XMPP for its chatrooms and presence, as it is showed by screenshots and demos. They use the GaimTheory platform, which has XMPP involved.

Cleartext announces XMPP IM SaaS

Sydney based messaging SaaS provider Cleartext has launched a new XMPP based instant messaging service called ClearIM.

Pizzja

David Ammouial has released Pizzja (“pizz-yah”), a Jabber component that allows you to control a single connection (resource) to your Jabber account using several clients. It is written in Python under GPLv2.

Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP)

Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), from Enomaly, is a virtual infrastructure management software, that uses XMPP as its core “decentralized command and control” component.

tribook.net has XMPP

tribook.net is a software for training tracking: hardware, runs, trainings, best performances, calendar, and competitions results. Olivier Anguenot has added XMPP chat features, allowing chat sessions with coaches and other community members, as well as file exchange.

KsirK network mode

KsirK, the strategy game, in version included in the fresh new KDE 4.2, has a network mode based on XMPP.

Kopete has Jingle

Still in the KDE 4.2 world, Kopete, the desktop environment’s instant messaging application, has now audio conversations features via Jingle.

Ubiety: opensource C# library

Ubiety [yoo-bahy-i-tee] is an XMPP library written in C# by Dieter Lunn, published under LGPLv3 license.

Desknote

Desknote is a multiplatform (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) microblogging GTK client for the menéame platform, written in C#/Mono and released under the GPLv3 license.

ActionMessenger

ActionMessenger is a Ruby on Rails framework for instant messagging inspired by and similar to Action Mailer, written by Daniel Noll under a BSD license.

JAXL

JAXL (“Jabber XMPP Library” or “Just Another XMPP Library”) is an XMPP library written in PHP, under the GPLv3 license.

shaim

shaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging application written in C# for Windows only, and published under a BSD license.

Jabber Feed 0.4

Jehan has announced Jabber Feed 0.4, a WordPress plugin, allowing to cross-post to PubSub. It has now TLS, SASL, automatic creation and configuration of PubSub nodes, SRV records, and much more…

identi.ca evolutions

identi.ca open micro-blogging platform based on laconi.ca software underwent an update, adding a new visual refresh, groups, and much more.

headstock

Sylvain Helegouarch has released a Python library under the modified BSD license, named headstock, that can run under IronPython 2.

Prosody 0.3.0

Matthew Wild has announced Prosody 0.3.0, the most notable change being its license, from GPL to MIT/X11.

Apple’siCal Server using XMPP’s PubSub for push-notifications

AppleInsider has a lengthy article about the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard, saying “Apple’s iCal Server, [...] is being updated to use XMPP publish-subscribe, an IETF open standard branching from the core of the Jabber IM service.” Remonder

Specifications

Many specifications have advanced their state since last roundup:

Last call

• XEP-0232: Software Information
  This document specifies an extended data format whereby XMPP service discovery responses can include detailed information about the software application that powers a given XMPP entity for including detailed data about the in service discovery responses.

1.0 / Active

• XEP-0205: Best Practices to Discourage Denial of Service Attacks
  This document recommends a number of practices that can help discourage denial of service attacks on XMPP-based networks.
• XEP-0245: The /me Command
  This specification defines recommended handling of the /me command in XMPP instant messaging clients.

Retracted

• XEP-0208: Bootstrapping Implementation of Jingle
  This document provides guidelines to XMPP client developers for bootstrapping implementation of Jingle technologies.

Initial

• XEP-0258: Security Labels in XMPP
  This document describes the use of security labels in XMPP. The document specifies how security label metadata is carried in XMPP, when this metadata should or should not be provided, and how the metadata is to be processed.
• XEP-0257: Client Certificate Management for SASL EXTERNAL
  This specification defines a method to manage client certificates that can be used with SASL External to allow clients to log in without a password.
• XEP-0259: Message Mine-ing
  In servers that deliver messages intended for the bare JID to all resources, the resource that claims a conversation notifies all of the other resources of that claim.

Deffered

• XEP-0209: Metacontacts
  This document specifies an XMPP protocol extension for defining metacontacts and grouping member JIDs.
• XEP-0165: Best Practices to Discourage JID Mimicking
  This document recommends best practices to discourage mimicking of Jabber IDs.
• XEP-0227: Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers
  This document specifies a file format for importing and exporting user data to and from XMPP-IM servers.
  

Afterword

Once again, a busy period for the XMPP community worldwide, further advancing  the capabilities and ubiquity of XMPP.

Welcome to the fifth roundup of XMPP activity worldwide. This report is authored by Nicolas Vérité, Laurent Lathieyre and Jack Moffitt. This is a very long article since we had a lot of activity these weeks.

Your contributions are welcome for future roundups.

Software Releases

In this edition of the XMPP Roundup, we have a lot of software releases: clients, servers, and tools.

Gajim 0.12

Astérix aka Yann Leboulanger has announced on his blog the release of Gajim 0.12. The full changelog since 0.11.4 is loaded with new features: mood, activity, nickname and tunes, encrypted sessions, Kerberos, file transfer over multi-user chat, lots of UI improvements (chat and preference windows, drag’n drop, single window mode, etc.), LaTeX support, and many more.

Tigase Server 4.1

Tigase Server version 4.1 has been released.  New features include virtual hosting, server monitoring, and virtual components.

BuddyMob

Laurent Lathieyre of Ubikod, pointed to BuddyMob, an Android application in private beta now, designed and developed by Ubikod for Kiboo.net, a Belgian company. BuddyMob is offering IM, social networking, feeds and geolocation… and it is all based on XMPP.

Ya Online Mobile

Yandex, the giant Russian search engine and web portal, has launched the mobile version (Symbian S60) of its Ya Online client, based on its Jabber/XMPP service.

Buddycloud

Buddycloud is a mobile application for Symbian S60, built on XMPP, offering status and location tracking services as well as chat.

Lampiro

Lampiro, is a mobile open source (GPL licensed) XMPP client developed by Bluendo. It is written in J2ME, and supports compression, TLS, group chats, gateways, data forms and touch screens.

Prosody

Matthew Wild announced on JDev mailing-list Prosody 0.1.0 (and 0.2.0 followed in less than a month), a new XMPP server, written in Lua, under the GPL license. It aims to be simple, light, and flexible.

Sleek Migrate

Sleek Migrate is a server migration tool announced by Kevin Smith, released under GPL license, based on the SleekXMPP library written in Python by Nathan Fritz.

Web-Based JavaScript XMPP Clients

We have a bunch of Web-based JavaScript XMPP clients:

• Nounours is based on ExtJS and JSJaC using BOSH, released under the GPL license
• iJab is using GWT and JSJaC, released under the GPL license
• TrophyIM is based on the Strophe library, released under the MIT license

Lime Wire 5.0 alpha

Lime Wire, the open source P2P software based on the Gnutella network, integrates Jabber in its 5.0 alpha version.

Web-based Services

Fire Eagle

Seth Fitzsimmons announced an XMPP pubsub interface to Yahoo’s FireEagle.

Remindr

Remindr sends you reminders via mail, phone or Jabber.

Chatterous

Chatterous lets you join multi user chats via your web browser, IM client, phone, or e-mail.

Other News

Outside of the software releases scope, we have other news:

Tigase Server virtual hosting

Above we mentioned the new virtual hosting support in Tigase Server. Artur has also made it configurable though the Psi XMPP client, with the help of ad-hoc commands.

Psi

With 1,500 downloads per day and 2.4 million downloads overall, the open source Psi XMPP client has made a long road since its beginning.

SAPO Codebits

Jack Moffitt’s talk (51 minutes) at SAPO Codebits is online, both the video and the slides.

FLOSS Weekly

Peter Saint-Andre gave an interview to FLOSS Weekly:, the audio is available or as an mp3 for download (33 MB, 1h12).

On the Specifications Front

The Jingle XEPs for multimedia sessions like voice and video, have entered a LAST CALL:

• XEP-0166: Jingle
• XEP-0167: Jingle RTP Sessions
• XEP-0176: Jingle ICE-UDP Transport Method
• XEP-0177: Jingle Raw UDP Transport Method

As with all Last Calls, please consider the following questions and send your feedback to the standards@xmpp.org discussion list:

1. Is this specification needed to fill gaps in the XMPP protocol stack or to clarify an existing protocol?
2. Does the specification solve the problem stated in the introduction and requirements?
3. Do you plan to implement this specification in your code? If not, why not?
4. Do you have any security concerns related to this specification?
5. Is the specification accurate and clearly written?

Your feedback is appreciated!

Some extensions aka ProtoXEPs have come in:

• Message Mine-ing: In servers that deliver messages sent to the bare JID to all resources, the resource that claims a conversation notifies all of the user’s other resources of that claim.

A few XEPs have entered Final status:

• XEP-0174: Serverless Messaging: Communicate over local or wide-area networks using the principles of zero-configuration networking and without the need for servers.
• XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications: Communicate the status of a user in a chat session – enaged, composing, gone, etc.
• XEP-0012: Last Activity: Communicate information about the last activity of someone.

XMPP: The Definitive Guide – Rough Cuts edition

Peter Saint-Andre, Remko Tronçon and Kevin Smith are writing a book on XMPP, for O’Reilly. The rough cuts are available online.

Conclusion

The XSF and XMPP community have been quite busy during the final weeks of 2008.  We wish to thank everyone for their efforts, advice, and participation in 2008, and we wish all a happy 2009 filled with similar successes.

Is There a New Successor to SIP?

Is XMPP is set to overthrow SIP as the VoIP signaling king? Tsahi Levent-Levi, a system architect at RADVISION, thinks it’s a possibility.

Codebits 2008 

XSF Member Pedro Melo has posted the content of his “XMPP – Hands On” presentation at Codebits 2008 (a Portuguese event hosted by Portuguese Telecoms company Sapo.pt ). The presentation itself is in Portuguese, the code accompanying it is, obviously, not :-) 

XMPP & Groupware

Another XSF Member, Nicolas Vérité, alerts us to a piece of XMPP groupware news -  that Thomas Cataldo has integrated XMPP instant messaging into MiniG, a webmail client for the OBM groupware solution (there’s a short video demo on Thomas’ blog). and notes that Zimbra, another groupware product also integrates Openfire.

Mingle

Sjoerd Simons has announced on the Jingle ML a new spec called Mingle, describing Multi-User Jingle Voice sessions :

• http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/jingle/2008-December/000285.html
• http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/mingle/mingle.html
• http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Mingle

Cloud Standardization: Unified Cloud Interface (UCI)

XMPP as a unified cloud interface component? Reuvan Cohen, of Enomaly, talks enthusiastically about implementing the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) as a XEP. Reuvan doesn’t appear to be on the XSF members list, perhaps he should be?