The XMPP Blog

The XSF held another successful XMPP Summit over the weekend at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Many thanks to the companies who sponsored this event: Nokia, Vodafone, Collabora, Isode, TANDBERG, Buddycloud, Collecta, and Ooros. Special thanks to Nokia for temporarily donating some N900 devices for the Developer Challenge, and to Mobile Vikings for the SIM cards that enabled a number of XMPP developers to experiment with building mobile applications at the conference. And extra special thanks to XSF Board member Florian Jensen for his hard work on local coordination (as well as the photos in this blog post).  [Read More]

Earlier today a member of the XMPP developer community noticed that he could log into Facebook chat using a standard XMPP client. The news has since been confirmed by Facebook. This is great news for XMPP, and great news for open standards in general. Although Facebook has not yet enabled federation with the rest of the public XMPP network, I’d imagine it is only a matter of time until that happens (after all, Google Talk launched in August 2005 but didn’t federate until early 2006).  [Read More]

Live from the XMPP Hackfest in Brussels, Belgium, here is the XMPP Roundup 13, dedicated this time to new and updated services. As announced before, the XMPP Roundup has been split into separate parts with “articles, talks and events” and “new and updated software” already published. This Roundup was brought to you with contributions from Alexander Gnauck, Will Sheward, Guillaume Le Galès, Kevin Smith, and Nicolas Vérité. EVE Online The EVE Online science-fiction MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) is using an XMPP service for in-game chats (also offering e-mail), on the eve-mail.net domain, with S2S (server-to-server) open for federation.  [Read More]

Welcome to the XMPP software Roundup 13. As announced in the latest Roundup, we have split it into different parts. The first part covered articles, talks and events. This post covers new and updated software, the next one will cover XMPP services. Special thanks to Will, Waqas, Jack, Guillaume, Nicolas, who have actively contributed to this report. Due to the high number of new items (yes, the XMPP community is super-active), we have sectionned these into the classical division clients, servers, and libraries, and… a last section you should check carefully.  [Read More]

The XMPP Standards Foundation is currently accepting applications for new members. This application period will run until the end of January. Why apply? Help the XSF with technical reviews and communication efforts Help elect the XMPP Council and XSF Board of Directors, or run for the Council yourself (council candidates must be XSF members) Help the XSF stay true to its mission of building an open, secure, feature-rich, decentralized infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration over the Internet Application instructions are available at http://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Membership_Applications_January_2010  [Read More]

Hey everyone! Less than 3 weeks left until the XMPP Summit #8 comes to Brussels. This year, we’ve got something new! Nokia has generously offered to sponsor a mobile XMPP developer challenge. What does that mean? Starting from NOW, you can start writing a mobile application for ANY Nokia platform (Maemo / S60v3 / S60v5 …). The requirements are: The program must be FREELY available; OpenSource is preferred. The application needs to be demoed on a Nokia Phone (we have demo devices on location) on the XMPP Summit (Monday). If you are not attending the Summit, find someone who is, and can demo / explain the app, and collect the prize. Limit of 1 application per attendee. Substantially new code, as decreed on the day by the judges. (If you have questions, the judges will give guidance, but the final decision will be made on the day) Judges aren’t eligible. And of course: The application needs to use XMPP in some way. The judges are: Jack Moffitt (XSF Board Chairman); Kevin Smith (XSF Council Chairman); Kristian Luoma (Nokia)  [Read More]

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.  [Read More]

Once again the XSF will be combining one of our Summit meetings with attendance at FOSDEM in Brussels on the weekend of 6/7 February 2010. We’ll have a devroom for half a day at FOSDEM (as we did last year - see here for some blog posts) and run the Summit around the FOSDEM weekend in a nearby Hotel. The current plan is to again hold a “hackfest” on Friday, have a free day at FOSDEM on Sunday, and then hold the official Summit on Monday.  [Read More]

[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).  [Read More]

Since 2006 the XMPP Standards Foundation has been offering free digital certificates to administrators of XMPP servers as a way of encouraging encryption of point-to-point “hops” on the XMPP network. This program has been successful in several ways: Thousands of XMPP deployments currently use certificates issued by the XMPP ICA. Popular XMPP clients and servers have fixed bugs in their code related to certificate handling. The XMPP community has gained practical experience with stronger encryption. Since the beginning, the XSF has functioned as an “intermediate certification authority” or “ICA”, where the root CA is StartCom. In collaboration with our friends at StartCom, we recently decided that StartCom will directly offer Class 1 certificates through its normal process at http://www.startssl.com/ instead of running a specialized service only for XMPP servers at xmpp.net. This lowers the administrative burden both for the XSF (we will no longer need to manually approve certain certificate requests) and for StartCom (they will be able to use the same code for issuing both web server certificates and IM server certificates).  [Read More]