The XMPP Blog

Welcome to the first installment of what we hope will be a continuing series of reports on XMPP technologies and the XMPP community (you can think of this series is a replacement for the old Jabber Journal). This report is authored by Peter Saint-Andre, Florian Jensen, and Jack Moffitt. Future reports might involve different authors just to keep things interesting; let us know if you’d like to help. Secure Communications Week The first Secure Communications Week is coming soon: October 4-11, 2008. [Read More]

Here at the XMPP Standards Foundation, we’re not just a bunch of protocol geeks. As firm believers in the old IETF mantra of “rough consensus and running code”, we run one of the most central nodes on the XMPP network: the jabber.org IM service. A lot of care and attention goes into running this service: hardware, hosting, software, and precious time donated by a dedicated group of volunteers. All of those factors were in evidence during our just-completed migration of the service to a new machine. [Read More]

For the fourth year in a row, the XMPP Standards Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code. Our projects for 2008 are as follows: Mateusz Biliński (vArDo) – Plug-in system for Gajim (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger) Adam Czachorowski (gislan) – Metacontacts support and various roster improvements for Psi (Mentor: Remko Tronçon) Tomas Karasek (tomk) – Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (XEP-0124) support in Gajim Jabber client (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger) Aleksey Palazchenko (AlekSi) – Psi: Message history (Mentor: Kevin Smith) Safa Sofuoğlu (huni) – Updating and Improving BOSH Support of Openfire (Mentor: Gaston Dombiak) Paweł Wiejacha (senu) – Themable WebKit-based Chat Dialogs (Mentor: Kevin Smith) Here’s to another successful summer of coding! [Read More]

Regrettably, the XSF has not issued an annual report since 2002. It seems we’re always too busy getting things done to report on our activities. But this year we decided to turn over a new leaf by completing an annual report, available at https://xmpp.org/xsf/docs/annual-report-2007.shtml.

Feedback is welcome, as always.

The XMPP Standards Foundation is happy to finally recognize United States Secure Hosting Center as an in-kind sponsor of the XSF. USSHC has been hosting the XSF’s server infrastructure (and before that the jabber.org project’s machines) for as long as anyone can remember, and has unfailingly provided not only a secure location for our infrastructure but also extremely reliable service. After many years of laboring in obscurity, USSHC is finally receiving due recognition for its efforts. [Read More]

Several months ago a developer in the Jabber/XMPP community let us know that the XSF’s intellectual property rights policy prevented him from including text, examples, and schemas from our XEP specifications in his code. In particular, the Creative Commons Attribution License (which we were using to cover XEPs) is not consistent with the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Since we are big fans of Debian GNU/Linux around here (we use it to run all the jabber. [Read More]

We issued a Last Call on the Jingle specifications on November 21st. So why have they not yet advanced to a status of Draft within the XSF’s standards process? There are several reasons: The end-of-year holidays intervened. We are gathering detailed feedback from a wide variety of implementors, including Google Talk, Nokia, Asterisk, and the One Laptop Per Child Project (via Collabora). We are defining a thorough mappingbetween Jingle and SIP for multimedia session negotiation, and still need to define the mapping in the direction from SIP to Jingle. [Read More]

FOSDEM is coming up soon (Brussels, February 23-24) and the XSF will once again hold a devcon (on February 24 and 25). The XMPP Standards Foundation would like to encourage XMPP technologists from Europe and beyond to participate, especially in the devcon. In its meeting earlier this week, the XSF Board of Directors authorized a new policy: the Foundation will pay the hotel costs of any XSF member who participates in the devcon. [Read More]

Today the XMPP Council issued a last call for comments on the various Jingle specifications for multimedia negotiation over XMPP. Comments should be provided by December 14, so read the following specifications and send your feedback to the standards@xmpp.org list: Jingle Jingle Audio via RTP Resource Application Priority Jingle ICE Transport Jingle Raw UDP Transport Jingle Video via RTP Jingle DTMF Bootstrapping Implementation of Jingle We will soon also publish a specification for mapping between SIP and Jingle for seamless gatewaying of open multimedia technologies. [Read More]

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open XML technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized XML routing. More formally, XMPP is defined by RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 as published by the IETF in October 2004. Everything we’ve built on top of those two specifications we call “XMPP extensions” (usually defined in the XEP series). [Read More]