The XMPP Blog

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.org/xmpp.org infrastructure), we decided to investigate the matter.  [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. We are working on some specifications that describe how to use Jingle as the method for negotiating additional session types (for example, file transfer and whiteboarding) so we can make sure that Jingle semantics are reusable for applications other than voice and video. These efforts should be finished in the next few weeks, which will enable the XMPP Council to vote on advancing the Jingle specifications during its in-person meeting at the XMPP devcon in Brussels on February 24-25.  [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. The XSF may ask that you share a room with another XSF member, but we will pay for up to four nights’ stay at the Atlas hotel in the center of Brussels (where we will be staying and meeting).  [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]

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. In accordance with our bylaws, any XSF member is welcome to stand for election to the Council, and any person is welcome to stand for election to the Board. Simply create an appropriate page on the wiki before September 7 and you will automatically be considered for election.  [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. The membership-based part means that we are run by the elected members of the organization.  [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. But the spec is stronger for the feedback and we’re looking forward to seeing implementations in more Jabber clients (e.g., there is a Google Summer of Code project to improve the link-local messaging support in the Adium client for Mac OS X).  [Read More]