The XMPP Blog

Although the Google Summer of Code ended weeks ago, we neglected to post a final summary. All of the XMPP-related projects ended successfully and all of our students continue to contribute to the community. You can download their code here and you can view final project reports from our students at the following links: Armando Diaz-Jagucki on PEP support in the Openfire server Bernardo Antonio de la Ossa Pérez on Extended Stanza Addressing support in the ejabberd server Brendan Taylor on Encrypted Sessions support in the Gajim client Matthew Wild on HTTP Binding / BOSH support in the gloox library Tobias Markmann on his Data Forms designer Tomasz Melcer on Jingle support in the Gajim client Congratulations to all our students and thanks to all our mentors! [Read More]

Every year is an election for the XMPP Standards Foundation, because since 2001 we have elected a new XMPP Council (our technical leadership team) and a new Board of Directors (our business leadership team) in late August or September. Naturally, this year is no exception. As XSF Secretary Alexander Gnauck recently announced, we will be holding our election meeting on September 27, although our online voting process will begin on September 8. [Read More]

Over the weekend, Alexander Gnauck (Secretary of the XSF) posted a notice about the Q3 membership application period. So this seems like a good occasion to explain a bit about how the XMPP Standards Foundation works. The XSF is a non-profit, membership-based, standards-development organization. The non-profit part means that we’re not here to make money. The standards-development part means that our mission is to produce open standards for communication over the Internet. [Read More]

Today we advanced XEP-0174: Link-Local Messaging to Draft in our standards process. This specification defines how to send XMPP messages in a serverless mode via zero-configuration networking (a technology created by Apple Computer, originally called Rendezvous and now called Bonjour). As previously mentioned, we issued a Last Call for comments on this specification on March 1. Feedback came in from a number of developers, resulting in some corrections late in the process, thus the delay in publication. [Read More]

As previously mentioned, we are working to update the core XMPP specifications by incorporating feedback based on the significant implementation and deployment experience with XMPP technologies we have gained since RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 were published in October, 2004. To date we have expected the revised versions to advance XMPP to a status of Draft Standard within the Internet Standards Process managed by the IETF. However, it seems that we overlooked some of the rules from RFC 2026, specifically that “standards track specifications normally must not depend on other standards track specifications which are at a lower maturity level”. [Read More]

We’ve scheduled XMPP DevCon3 for July 23 and 24, 2007, in Portland, Oregon, USA. Logistical details are being worked out right now, but save the dates if you’re interested in brainstorming real-time applications with other XMPP developers in an informal, technology-focused environment.

Stay tuned for further updates in the near future.

One of the roadmap items we discussed at the XMPP Summit in late February was the need to certify that XMPP clients and servers comply with our protocol specifications. While eventually we would like to have a formal certification program, we recently have taken two steps toward that goal: The publication of basic and intermediate certification levels for clients and servers in XEP-0211, XEP-0212, and XEP-0213. The launch of the XMPP Interoperability Testing Network, a private network of servers that XMPP developers can use for testing their code against a wide range of server and client implementations. [Read More]

Late yesterday the RFC Editor announced that the specification defining a URN namespace for use by the XMPP Standards Foundation has been published as RFC 4854. See our previous post for background information.

One of the high-priority items on our roadmap for 2007 is completing work on Jingle, the set of XMPP extensions for voice and video that we first published in late 2005. Although it’s taken us about 16 months, we are getting quite close to advancing the Jingle specifications to Draft status within our standards process. Jingle, originally based on the technology defined by Google Talk team, is now widely used in the One Laptop Per Child project as well as in the Nokia 770 and the Nokia 800. [Read More]

We continue to make incremental modifications to RFC 3920 and RFC 3921, the core specifications of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Most of these modifications are relatively minor clarifications or reflect implementation and deployment experience our community has gained since the XMPP RFCs were published in 2004. Today we submitted updated ("-02") versions of rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis to the IETF. The diffs from the “-01” versions are fairly small – see here and here for details. [Read More]