[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.
