The XMPP Blog

This year we had six students working on disparate projects for GSoC, and we’re delighted that all of them were successful! Here we link to a wrapup blog post from each of the students, and a description of their work from their mentors. We had Adhish Singh working on Internet of Things implementations. His mentor, Joachim, said: Adhish Singla: [Prototyping tools for IoT](http://www.xmpp-iot.org/gsoc/) Adhish started from no XMPP experience and have created 2 graphical interfaces to IoT devices supporting xep 323 and xep 325 (experimental). One as a standalone Cordova mobile application and one as part of the converse.js webpage xmpp client. He also implemented a python history client that is instatiated as another resource on a Device IoT JID and polls the device for momentary values and stores history in db or local storage. So when clients ask for historical data it will in parallell with the originating device return the longtime history as part of the XEP323 history part. The javascript parts was done with crafted IQ messaging but will be enhanced with real plugin usage that is now part of the strophe package. python code will be submitted into SleekXMPP distribution. Converse code is running on the [site](http://www.xmpp-iot.org/). We had Andreas Straub working on end to end encryption in the Conversations client. His mentor Daniel says:  [Read More]

Until now, St Peter has been handling the XSF Treasurer role. He’s stepping down from the role and the XSF Board is looking for someone new. The role of Treasurer includes overall responsibility for the financial affairs of the XSF. The future treasurer would: Maintain and monitor the XSF’s bank account with Wells Fargo NA Maintain and monitor the XSF’s post office box File income tax reports (Form 990) with the US IRS Pay franchise taxes with the State of Delaware Pay corporate registration fees with NRAI Pay for relevant domain name registrations Send invoices to XSF sponsors Reimburse XSF members for approved out-of-pockets costs Report on XSF finances to the Board of Directors So we’re looking for someone new. If you or someone you know would be interested in serving as the treasurer (they don’t necessarily even have to be an XSF member), please get in touch with the board or me directly. It would be great to have this post filled!  [Read More]

We’re happy to announce that Eyeball Networks are the latest organisation to become an XSF Sponsor. Eyeball Networks pioneered the STUN/TURN/ICE device-to-device connection technologies adopted by communications standards including SIP, XMPP, IMS, PacketCable, IBM Sametime, Microsoft Lync, and now WebRTC. You can read more about them here. Sponsors are vital to the ability of the XSF to continue to fulfil its mission to build an open, secure, feature-rich, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration over the Internet.  [Read More]

This year, we’ve been lucky enough to have had many great applications to take part in Google Summer of Code under the XSF. We’ve selected the following six students/projects and are looking forward to working with them over an exciting summer: Tarun Gupta: Extend Stroke Implementation Daniel Baczynski: Multi-account support in Swift Ishan Khanna: Add support for XMPP Serverless Messaging (XEP-174) to Smack Marvin W: Add support for DNSSEC to Smack via MiniDNS srtb: Axolotl support for Conversations Adhish Singla: Prototyping tools, for Internet of Things This should be a great summer for the students, and for all the projects involved.  [Read More]

When our newest Board of Directors were elected, they decided that they wanted to set some goals against which their achievements as Board members could be measured. And so this journey began… We started by asking the community what THEY cared about and what they wanted the Board to focus on. We took this information, turned it into measurable objectives and then asked the community to vote - what did they think the most important areas to focus on? There was a lot of debate here, and we listened - the measurables could have been something else, there are other ways of looking at this etc - but, we had to commit to something or a year on we would still be working how to measure what we were doing!  [Read More]

A slightly tardy share, but we have the presentations from Summit 17 in Brussels starting to trickle in! As more come in, this post will get longer (and hopefully have a more permanent home on the new site) but here we go: XMPP Research With their active blog xmppresearch.org, researchers from RWTH Aachen University and TU Dresden are contributing to an ongoing collection of academic works around XMPP, including a high-quality bibliography, demos and reviews. Domink Renzel presented their work and their goals to the Summit members.  [Read More]

At the recent Summit 17, we were very happy to welcome Dominik Renzel and István Koren from the recently launched site xmppresearch.org. The declared mission of the project is to: "collect and to present scientific research work based on XMPP" The site, which is a collaboration between RWTH Aachen University and Technische Universität Dresden, contains articles on recent XMPP-related research, demos and a comprehensive bibliography. They’ve recently blogged about their experiences at Summit 17.  [Read More]

We’ve just had the great news that Google have again accepted the XSF to mentor XMPP-related projects in the Google Summer of Code this year. GSoC is a programme whereby Google pays students a stipend to work on open source projects for the summer, and when we’re able to participate in this it’s a highlight of the year for us. If you are, or know any, talented students with an interest in realtime communication systems we’ve got a selection of interesting projects at http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Summer_of_Code_2015.  [Read More]

There’s some recent discussion about the sky falling for XMPP at Google. See this blog post by Dan York for example. In reality, we don’t know the state of XMPP inside Google because they don’t share their use of XMPP with the XSF. We do know Android’s Google Cloud Messaging uses it. We know Hangouts Videochat uses it. We know Google Talk still (insecurely) federates with (some) XMPP services. But from an outside perspective, Google has made no major recent changes in terms of how they’re using XMPP from what we can observe.  [Read More]

We’d like to say a big “thank you” to two companies who have recently signed up as sponsors of the XMPP Standards Foundation. Erlang Solutions are a new XSF sponsor who specialise in providing businesses with scalable solutions via the creation, integration, delivery and lifetime support of products and services based on the Erlang and Elixir programming languages. ProcessOne, a returning sponsor, are a leading provider in messaging platforms designed for scale and robustness. ProcessOne have developed ejabberd, an ubiquitous XMPP server that has been deployed to power some of the largest messaging platform in the world. Many people will remember their CEO, Mickaël Rémond, as a member of the Board of the XSF for a number of years.  [Read More]