Welcome to another edition of the XMPP newsletter.
News
The next release of Salut à Toi will include file sharing. Sharing files directly between two users has been possible before, but now it’s possible to share a file hierarchy, or in other words one or several directories. To share with someone, just use their XMPP address (JID).
Christopher Muclumbus is a new project to publicly list XMPP chat rooms. It provides a web interface with full-text search for room names, descriptions and addresses. Only rooms which are configured to be publicly listed are shown.
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SubscribeBlazemeter have written about 5 ways to load test chat plugins with JMeter. JMeter is an open source Java application designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. The article briefly discusses XMPP and mentions that JMeter has a plugin which provides support for XMPP.
Fanout has removed XMPP support from their cloud offering. It was never used at scale, and was mainly relegated to chat bots that needed compatibility with Google Talk. However, as Google phased out XMPP federation, such usefulness dwindled.
JC Brand wrote a blogpost about the Gulaschprogrammiernacht a hacker/maker event in Karlsruhe, where six people worked on XMPP-related projects and plans where hatched to organize a sprint in Cambridge.
Google Summer of Code Projects
Paul Schaub has been blogging regularly in May about his Google Summer of Code project, adding OpenPGP support for SMACK (XEP-0373 and XEP-0374).
Rishi Raj wrote a blogpost about their GSoC project, an XMPP Compliance Tester.
Events
An XMPP sprint is being organized for August in Cambridge. The event will take place in the Collabora offices and dates are still to be finalized. You still have a chance to vote for your preferred date and to suggest topics for the sprint. Visit https://col.la/xmppsprint and join the groupchat xmpp-sprint@chat.cluxia.eu.
GDPR
On 25th May the European Union’s “General Data Protection Regulation” has come into force.
The GDPR has had some people spooked, for example, in an alarmist post Monal has announcing its withdrawal from the EU.
The XMPP community has been discussing the GDPR’s impact and have come up with various ideas and strategies on how to ensure compliance.
Discussions happened regularly in the xsf@muc.xmpp.org groupchat.
There is a GDPR page on the XMPP wiki which collects and summarises the results of these discussions.
Winfried Tilanus, who’s been active in these discussions, created a new proto-XEP: Best practices for GDPR compliant deployment of XMPP
Software releases
Servers
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Prosody 0.9.13: A maintenance release to the old stable 0.9 branch, with many bug fixes, including some important security improvements. And then more recently 0.9.14, which fixes a [privilege escalation security issue]((https://issues.prosody.im/1147).
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Prosody 0.10.1 and then 0.10.2: which fixes a privilege escalation security issue.
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OpenFire 4.2.3 This release fixes a regression which made it impossible to update plugins from the admin console.
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Conversations Push Proxy, An XEP-0357: Push Notifications app server that relays push messages between the user’s server and Googles Firebase Cloud Messaging.
Clients
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Escalus 4.0.0: originally created as a tool to test XMPP servers, it can also be used as a standalone Erlang application. Changes include a new XML viewer, a new XML parser and stanza pipelining.
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Monal iOS 3.0.0 and then 3.0.1, have been released. The major release adds support for push notifications, a new UI layout, iPhone X support, multi-user chat improvements, conversation synchronization and more.
Libraries
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Smack 4.3.0-beta2: This release marks an important milestone in Smack’s development cycle as the ‘4.3’ branch was created, which means there are no major API changes to be expected.
