Miscellaneous

The RFC Editor has announced that RFC 6120 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core), RFC 6121 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Instant Messaging and Presence) and RFC 6122 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Address Format) are now official RFC documents produced by the IETF! This is a huge milestone for the XSF because it means that the core specifications for XMPP have been updated to incorporate years of implementation and deployment experience with our technologies. The basic building blocks for creating XMPP-enabled applications are more stable and more clearly defined than ever, giving developers a solid foundation for open-source projects, commercial products, and real-time services on the Internet. [Read More]

Just over a year ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved formation of a new XMPP Working Group to work on revisions to the core XMPP specifications and related tasks. The first fruit of this initiative is a working group last call on draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis, the core definition of XMPP. Officially this “WGLC” was two weeks long and therefore has already ended, but it will probably be extended for a week or two, so please review this (long!) specification and send your comments to the xmpp@ietf.org discussion list as soon as possible. [Read More]

The XSF’s Infrastructure Team has installed an issue tracker for use by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Because the core work of the XSF is the development of protocol specifications, we will use the “Spec Issues” project in the issue tracker to keep track of bug reports and feature requests related to our core specification series (XEPs) and related documentation such as XML schemas and data registries. Anyone can submit issues for consideration, and those tickets will be handled by the XSF’s Technical Review Team, the XMPP Council, the XEP Editor, and other responsible parties (we’re still working out the details about how we will track this feedback and incorporate it into our specifications). [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]

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]

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]

It’s well-known that XMPP technologies emerged from the open-source server project first released by Jeremie Miller in 1999, as well as the combined software/operator community that grew up around the server. In the early days, “Jabber” meant many things: Jer’s server, the protocol used between clients and servers, the server network, the community in general, even a company called Jabber.com (then Jabber Inc., purchased by Cisco Systems in late 2008). Over time we have worked to disambiguate the terms. Thus Jer’s server was renamed jabberd and the protocol was renamed XMPP. [Read More]

Reported by Peter Saint-Andre Back in March, we decided to hold an informal “Monthly XMPP Meeting” among developers in our community. Here is a brief report on the second such meeting, held today (April 14) in the jdev@conference.jabber.org chatroom (the archived discussion log is here). Here are some of the topics we discussed… Last Call for XEP-0232: Software Information The points raised included: Is this a misuse of service discovery? Will this make entity capability caches less useful because they will be too large to search easily? Does it make more sense to publish this information via the Personal Eventing Protocol using the old software version format? The XMPP Council will vote on XEP-0232 at its next meeting (April 22). More feedback is welcome before then on the standards@xmpp.org mailing list. [Read More]

Simon Tennant, CEO of Buddycloud, gave a talk at FOSDEM 2009 on Geolocation with XMPP. Buddycloud is an application for your mobile phone that lets your friends know what you are doing and where you are. You can find out more about Buddycloud here. [caption id=“attachment_334” align=“aligncenter” width=“422” caption=“Simon Tennant @ FOSDEM 2009”][/caption] Simon’s presentation is available in PDF format here [Read More]

The first event from the San Francisco XMPP and Jabber Technologies Meetup group took place on February 18th on “Implementing Pubsub for Web Services”, organised by Julien Genestoux of Notifixious.

Information on the meetup together with videos are available from:  http://technology.meetup.com/11/calendar/9322074/

We’ll publish news of further meetings of this group as and when we receive them.