planet.jabber.org

XPath support for my XMPP libraries was on my TODO list for a long time. Because agsXMPP is using its own DOM implementation I wasn’t able to use standard XPath libraries. Writing a custom XPath implementation is quite a challenge, and using System.Xml’s XPath functions would require 2 different DOMs and parsing the Xml twice, which was no option for me.

Because MatriX is using System.Xml.LinQ which has XPath support it was pretty easy to get this task done for MatriX now.

Of course you can do filtering based on powerful LinQ statements and the other filter classes in MatriX. But in many cases it’s required to build expressions dynamically on the fly. Also many programmers are familiar with XPath and prefer XPath over LinQ statements. The XPathFilter makes it also much easier to filter big complex stanzas with many nested elements.

The following example describes the usage of the XPathFilter. We setup a filter that matches all presence stanzas from the full Jid ‘user@jabber.org/MatriX’. Because MatriX and XPath in .Net are namespace aware we have to define prefixes in the XmlNamespaceManager. Otherwise we would get no results.

e.Stanza is the complete stanza which matches the expression.
e.Result is the result of the XPath expression. This is useful when you are interested only in fragments of the complete stanza.

void XPathFilter() { xmppClient.XPathFilter.XmlNamespaceManager.AddNamespace("JC", "jabber:client"); xmppClient.XPathFilter.Add("/JC:presence[@from='user@jabber.org/MatriX']", XPathCallback); } void XPathCallback(object sender, XPathEventArgs e) { Debug.WriteLine("Stanza: " + e.Stanza); Debug.WriteLine("Result: " + e.Result); }

Here are some other XPath example expressions to filter stanzas:

• filter all messages with the exact body of 'Hello MatriX
  /JC:message[JC:body='Hello MatriX']
• filter all presences where the Jid starts with 'gnauck@'.
  /JC:presence[starts-with(@from ,'gnauck@')]
• filter all messages of type=error which have a from and and a to Jid
  /JC:message[@from and @to and @type='error']

Our OneTeam XMPP client for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows is entering a private alpha period.

OneTeam is a multiplatform XMPP client for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. We have slowly worked on it during long months (and even years, it is being developed since 2006) but never had enough time and resources to release it properly.

The time to launch OneTeam in the wild and interoperable internet is soon arriving. We believe we have achieved our goal to deliver some real enterprise-class user experience. As a proof, we are using it inhouse on a daily basis as a productivity tool, without any major glitch.

For the record, OneTeam works as a Firefox extension, as well as a standalone application, on the three major platforms, thanks to the XUL technology. OneTeam has a nice dashboard-based interface, and handy user interactions improvements everywhere. This XMPP client supports a wide range of features, including chat and presence of course, but also Multi-User Chat (groupchat), message threading, history browsing, etc. It also features Jingle voice calls, as well as the exclusive Jingle Nodes feature demoed at FOSDEM, that works much like Skype. On the more technical side, there is the XML console, as well as a very interesting remote debugging console.

So, we are now releasing OneTeam, but in alpha quality for now, to the curious ones, and those willing to help and test. Please feel free to contact us, if you want to join the alpha testing, and report issues. Please e-mail nverite at process-one.net for a OneTeam ride.

I proudly announce that we have the first Jingle based VoIP Application on IPhone that supports Calling Over 3G!
This application is Nimbuzz, a fully featured Client that supports VoIP via Nimbuzz Contacts, NimbuzzOut, Skype, GTalk, Yahoo, MSN and it is also a SIP Client. It is the Mobile VoIP Freedom Gadget.
The battry consumption really rocks if compared with regular SIP Clients, plus the benefit to be able to receive and place calls, through different methods without any extra battery consumption.
The Application is Free on Apple AppStore and it is also available with VoIP support for Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile.

It uses XMPP and Jingle as the main bus for their services, enabling also the usage of your Nimbuzz account through other Clients like Adium, Pidgin, PSI, Empathy, Pandion, etc...

I am pleased to announce a new MatriX releases. All 3 MatriX editions were updated to
1.2.1.0 and are in sync with the version number now.

This release includes also the first version of the MatriX developer guide with many code examples. I will add continuous more content, code snippets and examples to this guide.

Download the new releases from here.

I am happy to announce release of a new version of the Tigase XMPP Server. This is the first version of the 5.x line and the code is still under intensive tests. As most of the tests are already passed and the code runs on a few live installations I consider this to be Beta ready.

Packages are available from the download page. As usually the test page has been updated with automatic tests' results for the published version.

Changelog list is quite long and modifications fall into a few categories:

Protocol:

1. A new implementation for handling external components connections, supporting XEP-0114, XEP-0225, with protocol auto-detection, multiple connections on a single port, multiple connections for a single external domain, etc…..
2. Full support for stringprep added. The use of the full stringprep processor is optional (off by default) and the JID processing can be changed via pluggable framework. 3 processors available now: full stringprep - very resources expensive, simple (regex based) - default, empty - no processing at all.
3. Roster changes: fixed issue with buddy name set to 'null' in some cases , multiple roster elements are now allowed for set requests, stringprep optimisations, support for extended buddy information to be stored with roster data in DB.
4. Fixed a problem with s2s connections for external components connected to the server - they are automatically detected by s2s component and all the traffic is routed properly
5. Fixed problem with not sending stream closing tag in some cases when the connection to the client is closed
6. Fixed rare issue occurring if there are multiple user connections with the same resource that the older connection with the resource was not closed.
7. Number of bug fixes and optimisations in s2s implementation, still no TLS support yet though.
8. Stream compression can be now activated at any time, it is up to the client to decide

Administration:

1. Server configuration code reworked, fixed an old issue with init.properties and tigase.xml configuration files, tigase.xml is no longer used by default (still possible though), configuration can be stored in the database and configuration management available via ad-hoc commands and scripting API.
2. Configurable packet filtering for every component separately can be loaded as plugins (and API)
3. MySQL schema and stored procedures updates for UTF-8 encoding, changed a last_login, last_logout fields default values from 0 to some correct and sensible value.
4. To overcome problems with packets order on some system there is a configuration option to not use priority queues which may sometimes cause packet reordering.

Development:

1. Scripting API reworked, this is not the server built-in core feature and the scripting feature is now available to all components automatically
2. Component repository API - an easy to use framework for tigase component developers to store certain kind of data in database - the data can be also manipulated via ad-hoc commands and scripting
3. Added secure logging mode for XMPP stanzas to prevent privacy issue - XML element CData is replaced with text: 'CDATA size: NNN'
4. A new API for component tasks added - based on Java TimeoutTask but a single thread controls all the component tasks
5. Lots of JavaDoc documentation has been added and online guides on the website
6. All the core Tigase code to use new JID and BareJID classes instead of String
7. Packet API changed to optimise ways stanza to/from addresses (JIDs) are used.
8. New SM plugging processors API introduced and an abstract class which make it very easy to follow packet flow. This is to avoid confusing detection where from, where to the packet is going (from the user, to the user, to the server….)
9. User registration code changed to allow for storing any kind registration data, the user can provide an extended form with additional fields and they all are stored in the DB

read more

After Jingle Nodes got submitted to XMPP.org inbox, the number of visits on the website and the Specifications grow at least 100%. This is a great step towards an OpenStandard P2P VoIP.
Imagine that the very first implementation was in Openfire in 2006, which was kind of rejected by several Jingle Developers(due STUN/TURN promiss) but accepted and used by SIP Community back there(which knew STUN/TURN are painful for P2P). 

In summary we already accomplished:

• In 2010, we have the specification on XMPP.org inbox: http://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/jingle-nodes.html
• In 2010, we have the specification accepted as 'Experimental' on XMPP.org: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0278.html
  
• Server Side Component 100% ready to use - Check http://xmppjingle.org for Download and Sources
• Client Side API (60% done) -  Check http://xmppjingle.org for Download and Sources
• Demo Client (Under Selection) - If you are a Client developer of an OpenSource XMPP Client and have interest on Jingle Nodes supports, you are a potential candidate. Contact us.
• Sea Beyond - Paris, 17th December 2009: Jingle experimenting session and a presentation, which is a new technical event that explores the future of real-time communication technology. It is organized by ProcessOne, an authority in XMPP and real-time communication software. 
• FOSDEM 2010 - XMPP Devroom @FOSDEM 2010 Presentation and Investigation about other P2P Solution adopted by Jingle Developers
• Talkr.im - The free IM service Talkr.im is running a public Jingle Nodes for their users. 

Special thanks:

NLnet foundation financially supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. And NLnet is sponsoring Jingle Nodes Contributions and Developments which also explains the fast development and accomplishments of the project. The community of OpenStandards and Specially all involved with Jingle Nodes project are proud and thankful for having such a great foundation helping and incentive towards XMPP and Jingle Freedom.
Jingle Nodes is a specification based on implementation and deployment needs, meaning that we have it first running and compiling, for later publish of the complete specification. Which makes it a ready to use technology and not only a technology paper. Thanks NLnet :)
What we have in the horizon:

• An Official recommend demo Client.
• A New Better Professional Logo contributed by Fernando Lins
• More Corporate and Public Deployments.
• Specification Improvements and Approval.
• Adoption in major Jingle Clients.
• Events. We LOVE Events and Invitations!

Recently I installed http://rapportive.com/ which is an add-on for Firefox and Chrome, which uses the Google ads space in your gmail, to show information about the sender of the current mail you are reading.
Basically your gmail will look like this:
It works very well and the important message about this kind of tool is the relevance and the ubiquity of contact lists nowadays. I currently use a Firefox add-on XMPP Client, which makes almost everything that I usually for Social Network and Work related stuff, to be inside my browser.

Dear Google, why don't you use the same space for 'Buzz' Timeline?

The free public XMPP/Jabber server Talkr.IM gets Apple Push notifications for iPhone.

The ProcessOne's free, open, public XMPP/Jabber server Talkr.IM is gaining a new feature: Apple Push notifications. This well enable users to get notified of offline messages when they arrive, as well as simulate a continued XMPP session on iPhone devices that still do not implement multitasking.

For the latter feature, since the iPhone still does not accept to run applications in the background, if you want to use another application, you will have to shutdown your XMPP client and thus disconnect from Talkr.IM. With the Push feature enabled on your XMPP client (if this one supports Apple Push notifications), you can tell your contacts you are still online when you are using other applications. You will then automatically receive notifications of new messages. And when you re-open your XMPP client, you will receive these messages.

OneTeam for iPhone has the Apple Push feature enabled: you will be able to use it on you Talkr.IM account. Just use you Jabber ID, like username@talkr.im, and for a simple configuration, go to the "Settings" tab, then "Push settings".

The Talkr.IM XMPP server will stop at 10:00am CET. This means:

• 01:00am Los Angeles
• 04:00am New York
• 12:00 Moscow
• 18:00 Tokyo

UPDATE: the Apple Push module is installed on Talkr.IM, and working fine. You can use it on OneTeam for iPhone. You can run a APNS module on your own ejabberd server with IMpush.

An ejabberd health check mechanism might be useful in your deployments, but using the HTTP file server might be overkill...

Some people want to do regular health checks on ejabberd, which is always a good idea. Doing a health check over XMPP might not be the solution, here is at least two reasons:

• with a pure ad-hoc solution like a cron script, you might need an XMPP library you might not want to install on your servers
• monitoring systems might not talk XMPP at all...

So people first think of the internal ejabberd HTTP file server, which then they have to configure through a specific listener and the right module... possibly with logs, they would have to manage (rotate, parse, clean, etc.).

Sometimes people just don't think there is already an HTTP listener on their internal BOSH Connection Manager. You would argue that BOSH uses the HTTP POST method. But the ejabberd BOSH Connection Manager replies to simple GET:

 

wget http://myserver.net/http-bind

 

And ejabberd will answer:

ejabberd mod_http_bind v1.2

An implementation of XMPP over BOSH (XEP-0206)

This web page is only informative. To use HTTP-Bind you need a Jabber/XMPP client that supports it.

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).

If you want to help out, the first step is to create an account, then you can start to submit bug reports and feature requests at the spec issues project.

The issue tracker is just the first in a series of process improvements we are working on to make the XSF’s standards even more transparent and efficient. Stay tuned for further reports in the near future!

– Peter Saint-Andre

This is a release candidate for the upcoming (and long-awaited) Prosody 0.7.0. With some testing and user feedback we hope that this will become the official 0.7.0 release in a week or two.

The main new feature of the 0.7 branch is support for libevent, meaning Prosody can efficiently handle large numbers of connections on a variety of platforms (expect benchmarks soon...). There is now also support for Cyrus SASL to handle authentication, allowing the use of LDAP, PAM, SQL or a range of other authentication methods such as GSSAPI.

Tobias Markmann has also added support for SCRAM, a new authentication mechanism that solves a lot of the problems and weaknesses found in the current and widely-used mechanisms. Prosody's SCRAM support has been successfully tested against development versions of Pidgin, Pandion and Gajim.

For a while Thilo Cestonaro has been busy contributing plugins to our prosody-modules project. Finally this release pulls in two of his plugins, mod_privacy and mod_proxy65.

A summary of changes since 0.6.1 (a more detailed post will accompany the final release):

• libevent: Better connection scaling
• mod_proxy65: XEP-0065: SOCKS5 Bytestreams proxy
• SASL: Support for Cyrus SASL backend
• SASL: Support for SCRAM-SHA-1 mechanism
• SASL: Allow insecure PLAIN authentication on encrypted connections only by default
• Compression: Support stream compression between servers now, as well as clients
• SSL: Disable SSLv2 protocol by default as it is insecure
• PEP: Support for on-demand item retrieval to allow User Avatar support
• Port multiplexing: Allow multiple services (c2s, s2s, HTTP/BOSH) on a single port
• Errors: Return the exact reason when server-to-server connections fail
• MUC: Add support for non-anonymous rooms (real JIDs visible to all)
• MUC: Allow destruction of rooms by owners
• BOSH: Cross-domain request support, avoiding the need for proxies
• mod_privacy: XEP-0016: Privacy Lists
• MUC: Show precise error when users are kicked from rooms

Known issues: For now the proxy65 module does not work with libevent enabled. Depending on the time taken to develop the fix it will either go into 0.7.0 final or 0.7.1 when ready - but we decided it shouldn't delay the release.

As always, please report any issues to any of the usual places, see http://prosody.im/bugs/ and http://prosody.im/discuss/.

Download

Windows: Installer | Zip

OS X: Installer (requires OS X 10.5 or newer, Intel (32bit/64bit) and PowerPC (32bit))

Debian/Ubuntu: 32-bit | 64-bit

Source tarball: prosody-0.7.0rc1.tar.gz

We have spent the last few months focusing on three things: quality, quality, and quality! For those of you with the Google voice and video chat plugin installed, you have recently received an automatic update that contains:

• A fix that reduces crashes on newer macs (Mac OS X v10.6.2 specifically)
• A fix for webcam compatibility on Windows (including HP webcams)
• Several fixes to increase plugin stability
• Several fixes to the infrastructure used to set up and connect your video calls.

From users who have chosen to “Report quality statistics” in their chat settings, we can see a substantial increase in call connection rates and a big decrease in the call drop rate (see chart below). We hope that this will result in more enjoyable conversations with our software.

As with all software, working on improving quality is a never ending process, so we hope that you will continue to report any issues you have in our user forum, and we will continue to work on improving connection rates and call quality.

Thanks to all of you who use our service -- and especially those of you who report issues!

Posted by Jessan Hutchison-Quillian and Mikael Drugge
Software engineers

The Pandion team is proud to announce the release of Pandion 2.6.90 stable. This release is the culmination of our effort over the past months to create a reliable and well tested application. All known major bugs have been addressed. Many features have been improved and added. Large parts of the application were redesigned and rearchitected. No animals were harmed.

Download

The latest stable version of Pandion can be downloaded directly from:
http://pandion.im/pandion_setup.msi

Notable Improvements

• Shiny new user interface theme.
• Contact list keyboard search for easier access to contacts. Supports find-as-you-type.
• Multi-row tabs to keep unlimited conversations open.
• Additional emoticon styles.
• HTTP proxy support when downloading extensions and updates.
• Faster sign-in process thanks to improved networking layer.
• Fixed many crashes, script errors and disconnection bugs.
• Redesigned Sign In dialog, Welcome Screen, Auto-Update dialog and About dialog.
• Single Sign On (SSO) support for the SASL mechanisms GSSAPI, NTLM and SP-NEGO.
• Update track selection: Help to test by choosing from stable, beta or development.
• Better standards compliance and protocol tweaks for compatibility with other XMPP software.
• Windows Installer compatible *.msi setup package for easier network deployment through Group Policy Objects (GPO).
• Right to left user interface for Arabic and Hebrew.
• Total of 29 translations: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.

EULA No More

Pandion 2.6.90 is published under GNU General Public License 3 or later. This is a copyright license without restrictions on usage. There is simply no End User License Agreement (EULA) anymore. Enjoy freedom!

Update Instructions

• Manual
  Download and run the installer. Pandion will uninstall any older vesion, install the update, and launch automatically.
• From Pandion 2.6.x
  The auto-update service in Pandion 2.6 automatically downloads and installs the update. When the update is ready users are prompted to restart Pandion.
• From legacy Pandion 2.5
  Users of the legacy Pandion 2.5 version are notified through the auto-update mechanism. This mechanism is not compatible with certain types of HTTP proxy servers. As a fallback the download page opens in the default web browser to manually download and install the Pandion update.
  Note: The Pandion 2.6.90 installer automatically removes Pandion 2.5 from the system before deploying the new version.

Development Facts

Since starting work on Pandion 2.6 there have been:

• 73 issues reported, 42 closed
• 90 automated builds
• 389 source code commits
• 285 discussions by 418 people
• 6,286 daily users
• 39,615 auto-updates

Welcome to the Specification part of the XMPP Roundup #13, your irregular news from the XMPP community. It has been a long time since we have reported on specifications changes. Here is a short summary of what happened since September.

This edition has been brought to you by Johann, Kevin, Will, Guillaume, Peter, and Nicolas.

Publishing Tools

XSF member Tobias Markmann has been doing great work on our publishing tools. In addition to improving the primary XEP page by enabling you to filter based on XEP type and status, he has developed a way for us to generate our specs in PDF format, with syntax highlighting for example stanzas. You can now download each one of them, read them while offline, and distribute them to your customers, partners, and best friends. You can also get the full pack as a tarball: xepbundle.tar.bz2.

Tobias and Waqas Hussain have also been working on a tool to compare XEP versions that recently went live. Thank you very much Tobias and Waqas!

Technical Review Team at work: Multi-User Chat

The newly-created Technical Review Team is currently working to complete a thorough review of the venerable XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat. The team is also taking on more responsibility for maintenance of existing specs and publishing of new ones. We’ll have a full report on those efforts in the near future.

XEP Submissions

Because use of XMPP continues to grow, the XSF receives new XEP proposals on a regular basis. The latest submissions are:

• Jingle Relay Nodes
• Server IP Check

New XEPs

These are the new XEPs have been accepted as ‘Experimental’ by the XMPP Council:

• XEP-0275: Entity Reputation
• XEP-0276: Temporary Presence Sharing
• XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP

Last Call

As XEPs move through the XSF’s standards process, they are proposed for advance from ‘Experimental’ to ‘Draft’ (or ‘Active’ for informational specs). The following XEPs are in last call before moving ahead:

• XEP-0226: Message Stanza Profiles
• XEP-0227: Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers

Moving to Draft

Since our last roundup, one XEP has been advanced to ‘Draft’:

• XEP-0270: XMPP Compliance Suites 2010

Updated Specs

The XSF’s specifications are living documents that are updated regularly as we receive bug reports, feature requests, implementation feedback, and discussion in our chatrooms and email lists. Since the last roundup updates have been committed to the following XEPs:

• XEP-0189: Public Key Publishing
• XEP-0166: Jingle
• XEP-0167: Jingle RTP Sessions
• XEP-0177: Jingle Raw UDP Transport Method
• XEP-0249: Direct MUC Invitations
• XEP-0215: External Service Discovery
• XEP-0273: Stanza Interception and Filtering Technology
• XEP-0260: Jingle SOCKS5 Bytestreams Transport Method
• XEP-0261: Jingle In-Band Bytestreams Transport Method
• XEP-0234: Jingle File Transfer
• XEP-0253: PubSub Chaining
• XEP-0268: Incident Reporting
• XEP-0124: Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (BOSH)
• XEP-0227: Portable Import/Export Format for XMPP-IM Servers
• XEP-0251: Jingle Session Transfer
• XEP-0181: Jingle DTMF
• XEP-0175: Best Practices for Use of SASL ANONYMOUS
• XEP-0136: Message Archiving
• XEP-0085: Chat State Notifications

Deferred Specs

At any one time, many XEPs are under consideration in the ‘Experimental’ state. If any given XEP is not updated in 12 months, its status is changed to ‘Deferred’. There is no shame in being deferred, since that happens quite often. Since our last roundup the following XEPs have been deferred:

• XEP-0152: Reachability Addresses
• XEP-0225: Component Connections
• XEP-0186: Invisible Command
• XEP-0214: File Repository and Sharing
• XEP-0254: PubSub Queueing
• XEP-0252: BOSH Script Syntax
• XEP-0168: Resource Application Priority
• XEP-0197: User Viewing
• XEP-0196: User Gaming
• XEP-0195: User Browsing
• XEP-0194: User Chatting

That’s it for this roundup. In the future we plan to post shorter but more frequent entries about the XSF’s specs activity, so stay tuned for updates. And of course if you are especially interested in XEPs, you can join the Standards mailing-list or just read the archives.

Here's a collection of interesting XMPP-related updates from the microblogging world this week:

malditogeek: http://github.com/malditogeek/Pocho takes the stage! #weekendhack #xmpp #redis #ruby #

Pocho looks to be a neat little XMPP bot that stores hashtagged messages to XMPP group chat rooms. It also exposes these stored messages via a web interface as well. It sounds like an interesting bot!

kocio: #Jingle Nodes on Talkr.IM - simpler #XMPP #VoIP for the people http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/jinglenodeson_talkr.im/ #osnews #

Thiago talked about Jingle Nodes at the XMPP summit, and they look interesting. I unfortunately missed his talk at the summit, but from what I understand, it brings Skype like peer-to-peer relaying to XMPP Jingle.

It will be interesting to see this develop further. Jingle is really starting to become part of the normal XMPP landscape. For example, at the summit, the N900s that Nokia kindly let us borrow all had support for Jingle calls.

tofu: 'BOSH warming' ejabberd module. cool stuff! !xmpp http://github.com/theoooo/modwarmbindings #

This is another implementation of the HTTP pre-binding technique. See mod_prebind and ModHttpPre_Bind for two other example implementations.

There is not yet a standard for this technique, so each of these implementations does it differently. I think it's time to write a XEP.

stpeter: it's somewhat amusing that both the SIP-Communicator client and onsip PBX support XMPP these days... #

Amusing, but not surprising. After all, Cisco is a huge VoIP company, and they themselves purchased Jabber.com. The writing has been on the wall for a while for SIMPLE.

arc: #jabiru is a horribly broken !xmpp client for !android, is this really our only option? #

stevegibson: @arc: a quick google found the JabbIM !xmpp client for !android. #

thaluser: I found a GPLv2 !xmpp client for !android that works with #facebook called Yaxim. Unfortunately, it's not in the official market. #

If you're looking for an XMPP client for your favorite Android device, these three might be worth checking out.

danbri: experimenting with QR Codes as TV Test Cards as !XMPP service discovery hack - http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4359291206/ #

danbri: Scanning our TV with 3g iphone; it reads !xmpp jid from qrcode at 3 paces http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4360377558/in/photostream/ #

I met Dan Brickley at the summit, and he is doing some really interesting things with remote controlling media experiences that incorporates XMPP. I highly recommend paying attention to what he's doing as I suspect you will be seeing more great stuff.

tdfischer: Dear tokbox: Thanks for using XMPP. You make reverse engineering easy. <3, tdfischer #

Thankfully, since XMPP is an open standard, reverse engineering is unnecessary. That's the whole point!

mathemonkey: Wow! @elance uses #xmpp http-bind for "workroom" collaboration service… but it's not accessible using ordinary XMPP client or GTalk :-( #

I wonder if this is because they use a custom authentication mechanism or if it's just a case of not knowing the credentials to provide. In any case, it's great to see XMPP in more places. I'm getting a little tired of seeing so many duplicate implementations of chat services.

ssethi: XMPP and One Social Web http://j.mp/cRykDk #

The One Social Web presentation at the summit was one of the most talked about, but unfortunately I showed up only at the end. I expect we'll see some good things from this team.

h4nnes: Any recommendations for a xmpp client for iphone? im+ keeps crashing here :/ #

I use OneTeam for the iPhone, which has pretty good support for group chat as well as normal IM. The recently launched Meebo client also supports XMPP, but it does not support group chat.

vmlemon: Just configured XMPP-based FaceBook Chat in Pidgin, and pleased to see that it works as advertised. Now if only it supported federation... #

I think Facebook will get there. Server to server communication is one of the trickiest parts of XMPP, and it makes since that they would save this part for last. It took Google a while to get federation working as well.

dbanes: Anyone implementing XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP ? #

I just heard about such an implementation from a comment on my blog. The site is called BuddyMob, and apparently is an extended implemenation of XEP-0277. Hopefully the extensions will find their way into the specification as well.

jprieur: Archipel, xmpp based orchestrator for virtualization http://www.archipelproject.org/ #

This looks like an interesting start to virtualization infrastructure management.

drunknbass: I'm thinking you could totally power a game like words with friends with XMPP (openfire) #

I think that would be a great weekend project, and XMPP would be a perfect transport. With Strophe.js, HTML5 Canvas, and some JavaScript, this game could be made fairly easily.

xmppjingle: @pedrosorren Do you know Microsoft released an XMPP Gateway for its OCS closed services, due high customer demand? #theworldisopen #

One day, maybe we'll see MSN and AIM get XMPP gateways just like Facebook. Sometimes it takes a decade or so for a project to fulfill its original goals.

xmppjingle: Facebook announced that their are building Mobile APIs, why not just expose its services over XMPP? The Chat works extremely well so far #

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a native XMPP interface to these APIs. For example, Gmail has shown that even though its mail interface doesn't map cleanly to IMAP, there is enormous value in leveraging IMAP clients. Sure, it takes a little thought and planning, but the end result is well worth it.

rektide: what do #buzz, #xmpp, and to a degree #wave have in common? failure to abide the most basic/essential axiomatics of the #web; the uri. #

URIs are great and are used in XMPP where they make sense. I think most people would agree that e-mail style addresses are easier to use for humans than most URIs, though. XMPP is not a solution to all problems, and neither is HTTP.

That said, I've seen several efforts now to bridge some of the gap between HTTP and XMPP - sending stanzas through REST APIs, exposing chat rooms as web pages, etc.

gashcrumb: just a little bit closer to having a proper mock XMPP server to run unit tests against. nice! #

I hope this will be open sourced. There is unfortunately little in the way of specific XMPP testing tools. This is often brought up at the XMPP summits as something most of us want and need, but so far it has proved more complicated that it looked.

Last December Pandion 2.6 was made available for download from the official website. Before that only a handful of brave testers were using the development builds.

The overwhelming majority of users are still running Pandion 2.5, released over four years ago, and probably oblivious to the recent rebirth of the project. But Pandion 2.6 is stable enough for release so soon all Pandion 2.5 users will receive an update notification.

I collected data on the last two months of Pandion 2.6 distribution. Three accurate data sources are available:

1. FeedBurner: Number of daily users and auto-updates.
   The Pandion 2.6 update mechanism polls an Atom feed proxied by FeedBurner. This service provides detailed statistics on the number of users ("Subscribers"), as well as their Pandion version and language setting by parsing the User-Agent HTTP header.
2. Google Analytics: Website visitors and downloads.
   The pandion.im website contains a Google Analytics tracking cookie and a custom hook to track manual downloads of the Pandion installer. These downloads are served directly by the pandion.im web server and do not add to the download count of the SourceForge data.
3. SourceForge: Auto-update downloads.
   When a new version of Pandion is available all clients automatically download it from the SourceForge content delivery network. Occasionally someone will manually visit this page to download a development build but this is likely negligible.

So what does it add up to?


Blue: Usage is climbing at a high rate, week after week. This is a good sign! The weekend dips indicate that Pandion is used in many professional environments.

Red: The spikes are updates of stable builds. The huge majority of users is on the stable update track. The beta and development tracks are much less popular but important nonetheless. Making it easy for testers to try beta and development builds has helped us find and fix many bugs.


Blue: Download traffic is stable. Combined with the usage growth shown above this implies that people continue using Pandion rather than just downloading, trying and uninstalling. Again a good sign.


This graph is a little deceptive. The Y-axis scale is logarithmic. And the X-axis shows version numbers, not dates.

So this graph shows that 2.6.70 and 2.6.86 are orders of magnitude more popular than any other version. That is because they are both the stable builds. What's interesting is that 2.6.86 reached the same number of auto-updates in a few days as 2.6.70 reached in about two months.

ConclusionThis provides a little insight into Pandion 2.6 usage and a point of reference for future growth. I would like to automate this data collection and analysis. Having a live graph of our progress towards world domination would be fun and motivating.

It has been just a few days since Jingle Nodes alpha XEP was dropped in XMPP.org inbox, and we already have running code :)
Talkr.im announced today that they are running a Jingle Node Public Relay in their Server, and every Talkr.im user can make use of it for Jingle Calls.

They are running the code from http://xmppjingle.org (Erlang Version), which holds main Jingle Nodes Contributions.

In order to consume their Relay services you just need one IQ Packet (see http://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/jingle-nodes.html )

Lets see who will be the first to distribute a Jingle Client with Jingle Nodes support!

A Jingle Nodes relay has been installed on the Talkr.IM XMPP service.

The public XMPP server Talkr.IM has received its own Jingle Nodes relay on: xmpp:jn.talkr.im. You can browse the Talkr.IM services via your Service Discovery interface in your XMPP client.

This new exclusive feature on Talkr.IM XMPP server enables Jingle calls by providing a public service for media relaying. Basically, this means that XMPP clients which can handle Jingle Nodes, will be able to join other Jingle Nodes enabled clients to establish voice calls even when both are hidden behind network barriers (like NAT, for the techies).

One many entities of the XMPP federated network (clients, servers) will have Jingle Nodes enabled, this will be possible to establish calls, in a totally P2P manner, much like Skype, but with much more features like the control of who can use your relay. Read the Jingle Nodes website and the Jingle Nodes XEP to know more.

This Talkr.IM Jingle Nodes relay is one of the very first step to a simpler Jingle user experience worldwide.

Visit the Talkr.IM website, and create your own Talkr.IM XMPP account freely: https://www.talkr.im/signup.

OneTeam for iPhone has been published on the AppStore in version 3.2.5, bringing bugfixes, and Facebook chat based on XMPP.

The version 3.2.5 of our XMPP client OneTeam for iPhone has hit the shelves of the Apple's application store. It is recommended that you upgrade it.

OneTeam 3.2.4 for iPhone had already fixed bug related to Multi-User Chats (also known as groupchats): in some cases, OneTeam used to crash on joining password-protected and members-only MUC.

OneTeam 3.2.5 for iPhone now allows OneTeam users to connect to the XMPP interface to Facebook chat. You can now connect with Jabber-ID set your "your_username@chat.facebook.com", and password set to your Facebook password.

Be careful, Facebook's XMPP chat interface does not offer MUC services, nor is federated, which means you still cannot chat with your friends on Talkr.IM or Google's Talk/GMail, but only with Facebook friends.

Check out OneTeam for iPhone on our website, as well as Apple's AppStore.

The 8th XMPP Summit has come and gone, and it was a blast. I tried to record all the excellent talks from the FOSDEM XMPP dev room, but I only managed to record the very first one. Watch below as Remko gives a good overview of all things XMPP.

This video requires a browser that supports HTML5 video in Theora format. Support open, royalty-free multimedia codecs!

If you'd like to learn more about XMPP from Remko, he and some others wrote a book as well.

I'll bring some better equipment to the next XMPP Summit so that more of these videos can be published.