Miscellaneous

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]

Although the XMPP Standards Foundation runs its own standards process and publishes a dedicated specification series for XMPP extensions, we continue to work within the Internet Engineering Task Force on relevant specifications, which we mirror at xmpp.org for convenient access. Lately we have updated several of the RFCs and Internet-Drafts we are working on within the IETF: draft-saintandre-rfc4622bis this document corrects several errors in RFC 4622, which defines the xmpp: URI scheme (a handy diff from RFC 4622 is here) [draft-saintandre-jabberid](http: www.[Read More]

Members of the IETF’s SIMPLE Working Group recently analyzed the scalability of SIP/SIMPLE technologies with respect to sharing presence between domains. Because their work provides a helpful baseline for comparing presence technologies, we decided to perform a similar analysis for XMPP. The results should be of interest to any large enterprise, ISP, or carrier that is contemplating deployment of presence-based services. Consider some of the relevant results for bandwidth usage between two presence domains:[Read More]

Following in the grand tradition of XEP-0076 (implementation in the Psi client announced today), XEP-0132, XEP-0148, and XEP-0183, today we published XEP-0207: XMPP Eventing via Pubsub (XEP). This new “XEP XEP” is perhaps the most significant XMPP extension protocol yet published by the XMPP Standards Foundation, since it provides a solid, extensible foundation for any further payloads we might want to send over the network. Read the spec for complete details.[Read More]

Freedom is one of our core values in the Jabber/XMPP community. The focus on freedom goes back to Jeremie Miller, who invented the base of our technologies in 1998 as a way for people to connect over the Internet without the silos and restrictions enforced by consumer IM services. Over the years that sense of freedom has broadened and deepened. Consider: Our community has centered on Internet protocols (not a given open-source codebase) in part to give developers the freedom to use whatever license they want: free source, open source, freeware, shareware, commercial, or any combination thereof.[Read More]

At the XMPP Summit on Monday we held a rare in-person meeting of the XMPP Council, since we had four of the five Council members in attendance. Among other things the Council issued a Last Call for comments on XEP-0174: Link-Local Messaging. This technology, which enables real-time messaging in the absence of a server, was pioneered by Apple in an early version of their iChat client. It has since been adopted in several open-source instant messaging clients and is now also widely used in the One Laptop Per Child project.[Read More]

Yesterday the IETF announced that draft-saintandre-xmpp-urn has been approved by the IESG for publication as an informational RFC. What this means for us is that the XSF (specifically the XMPP Registrar) will control its own “tree” of Uniform Resource Names to issue for use in XMPP Extension Protocols, as specified in Section 4 of XEP-0053. This is good because URNs are more stable than the URIs (such as “http://jabber.org/protocol/muc") that we’ve been using for XML namespaces in our protocols.[Read More]