Welcome!
We've needed a weekly news report about Jabber for ages. Finally someone has gotten organized enough to publish it. And who better for the job than stpeter, a Certified Jabber Fanatic who even has Jabber license plates?
OK, enough about me. Let's dive right in.
Big news this week is the alpha 1 release of jabberd 2.0. Yes, the Jabber server that started it all is undergoing a huge makeover! This is a completely new codebase, and it's licensed only under the GPL. Kudos to Rob Norris and the rest of the jabberd team for cranking this out. Rumor has it we might even get a beta by the end of the year -- talk about a great Christmas present! But of course it will be ready when it's ready. You can't rush free software. (Yes, we have read the Mythical Man-Month around here.)
Much of the other software news this week is about multi-user chat (MUC). Yours truly has been slaving away for two months on JEP-0045, a pretty darn complete protocol for multi-user chatrooms in Jabber (a.k.a. groupchat or text conferencing depending on who you talk to). MUC brings Jabber up to the level of IRC in terms of features and functions, with a more secure model of room ownership and administration. David Sutton has been working hard on a server component, and released mu-conference 0.3 the other day. Plus Exodus, Rival, tkabber, and IMCom all now have support for MUC, with more client support on the way. And MUC is backwards-compatible with the old "groupchat 1.0" protocol, so older clients can join MUC rooms (they just don't experience all the advanced features). It's a big step forward for Jabber.
Other software released this week includes a new Jabber roster utility (wonder how it will handle my roster with 1000 items), a first release of the Skabber client for Windows, version 0.0.2 of the JabberX client for Unix systems (go CLI!), and version 0.3 of DizzyD's Nitro client for Mac OS X (now with SSL support!). And server admins with RedHat-style Linux machines might be happy to learn that Bret Mogilesky has created a source RPM of jabberd 1.4.2, MUC, PAM, and the transports.
In protocol land, we've had a bunch of new JEPs recently. I wrote up some informational documentation of vCards and search, while Russell Davis (ukscone) did the same for private data storage. And temas reports that good progress is being made on file transfer -- yet another piece of functionality that's been lacking in Jabber for a long time. For details, see the log for last night's meeting of the Jabber Council. And no, we haven't made much progress on publish-subscribe protocols, but pgmillard and I plan to work out a framework for that soon, so that others can start contributing the various parts of the puzzle.
Within the JSF, both the Marketing Committee and the Compliance Committee have started making progress. The Compliance Committee has a wiki site up and running, so free free to dive in! And the marketing folks expect to announce some major initiatives soon.
Finally, the IETF announced the formation of a Working Group devoted to XMPP, our very own Jabber protocol. This is another major step forward for the Jabber community. Among other things it will lead to further improvements in the protocol by having the broader Internet community critique what we've done, especially in the areas of security and internationalization. Check out http://www.jabber.org/ietf for the latest information about the XMPP WG, or sign up for the mailing list.
And if a weekly news report just isn't enough for you, start hanging out in the jdev chatroom. You'll get your Jabber fix in a hurry!
Jabber on!
--stpeter
