Miscellaneous

MongooseIM is a scalable, efficient, high-performance instant messaging server. At Erlang Solutions, we believe that it is essential to use the right tool for the job, and this is why the server implements the proven, open, and extensible XMPP protocol, which was designed for instant messaging from the beginnning. Thanks to the inherent flexibility of XMPP, MongooseIM is very versatile and has a variety of applications. Being specified in RFC and XEP documents, the protocol ensures compatibility with other software as well, including multiple clients and libraries. Similarly to the protocol, we have chosen the Erlang programming language, because it was designed with the intention of handling large numbers of parallel connections - which is the exact case in a messaging server. [Read More]

MongooseIM is a scalable, extensible and efficient real-time messaging server that allows organisations to build cost-effective communication solutions. Built on the XMPP server, MongooseIM is specifically designed for businesses facing the challenge of large deployments, where real-time communication and user experience are critical. The main feature of the recently released MongooseIM 6.2.1 is the improved CETS in-memory storage backend, which simplifies and enhances its scalability. [Read More]

Managing funds is easy when you’re a large project owned by an incorporated entity with accountants at your disposal, or when you’re a small project run by one person who accepts and uses all donations. When you’re in between, however, it can be difficult to handle. If you’re a project with a few regular contributors but no bank account, who handles the money? For many projects the answer is a fiscal host. [Read More]

Translations: Deutsch Español Française Română Several people have recently reached out to me asking what kind of messenger they should be using now - they said that they actually do not understand what they should be concerned about and whether they should switch from one of the commonly known messengers to another. I wondered how to answer this. Obviously, I could simply have advocated for XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), but then I thought this might not be a helpful answer by itself. Often, people just make a quick decision about their communication software and this usually isn’t a well-founded choice; and so they will end up switching to yet another messenger later. [Read More]

The XSF provides a public list of XMPP implementations on its website. For this list to be useful, it should contain up-to-date information about up-to-date software. To achieve this, the XSF Board has decided that all implementations have to reapply once per year, to ensure that they are still actively maintained and that the listed info is accurate. This is a purely formal process, though we encourage implementors to follow the current compliance suites. [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]

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]

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]

“Why should I use XMPP?” is a question we get asked a lot. Our answer is often technically-focussed, as there are plenty of reasons XMPP might be the right choice, or we might explain about the benefits of a federated approach - where everyone can run their own server and control their own data. Either way, the fact it is an ‘open standard’ never ceases to be mentioned. Open standards have many advantages over proprietary formats (too many to list in one blog post) but one in particular is that it gives you the choices and control about how you access your data and services. [Read More]