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