This week saw the first meeting of the XMPP Working Group within the IETF. The official meeting minutes have not been published yet, but we don't have to wait for them to say that the meeting was quite a success (see the discussion log from Wednesday's JSF meeting for some details). A crowd of about 150 hard-core protocol geeks (who else attends IETF meetings?) came to hear Jeremie Miller, Joe Hildebrand, and myself present some of the current thinking in the WG regarding internationalization, security, and standards compliance. All three presentations are available at http://www.jabber.org/ietf/55/, so check them out. The first order of business now is to follow up on the mailing list to gain consensus regarding some of the proposed changes, which will hopefully occur in the next few days. I'm planning to release a new revision of the core and IM Internet-Drafts the week of December 2, a fully updated revision of the CPIM draft the week of December 8, and a further revision of core and IM before Christmas. Now that we've got the WG, it's time to press forward!
Unfortunately all this work on the Internet-Drafts has slowed up my progress on the Jabber Manual. I've converted all the existing files to modular DocBook format, including heavy use of olinks and external entities. Hopefully I can crank out some content changes very soon, because we have translators standing by for 16+ languages!
In JEP land, we made some good progress this week. First and foremost, the thoroughly-revised version 1.5 of the JEP that defines the JEP process was approved by the Jabber Council. This includes some important intellectual property protection for the Jabber community in the form of the JSF's IPR Policy, which I worked out with help from Larry Lessig and Molly van Houweling. Among other things this means we can finally move forward with the Data Gathering and Reporting and XML-RPC JEPs, which should advance to a status of Final soon.
Speaking of advancement, the Multi-User Chat proposal was voted to Draft this week. Other JEP releases in the last seven days include version 1.1 of Server-Based Privacy Rules (whitelisting and blacklisting), an updated version of Feature Negotiation (using the jabber:x:data protocol described in JEP-0004), version 0.10 of Service Discovery (a.k.a. "disco"), version 0.5 of Direct TCP for peer-to-peer functionality between Jabber clients, and some small fixes to the informational jabber:iq:privacy JEP (currently in Last Call).
In the world of Jabber software, Rob Norris just announced the alpha 2 release of jabberd2 (that's the replacement for the venerable jabberd 1.4.2 server -- which, by the way, seems to be a SCO add-on to the UnitedLinux distribution [source]). There were also updated versions of the Yabber client for Windows and the JSO Java library. I also learned this week about a Tcl library called JabberLib and was reminded of the JabberCE client for WinCE as well as the Merlin server for Windows. It's hard to keep up with all this Jabber software!
Don't forget, the jabber.org website contains pages that list clients, libraries, and servers, as well as a directory of public Jabber servers. If you don't see your favorite software or deployment on those lists, let me know! In particular, as announced on the JDEV list today, I would really like to add entries for all the clients on the old JabberCentral client list (or at least the ones that are still actively developed). You can help by poking the relevant developers. So feel free to pitch in. :)
Finally, it seems that Jabber integration is proceeding in the world of web forum and site engine software. There's now a Jabber module for Invision Board written in PHP, and I've heard about some Jabber work going on with regard to phpBB as well. Now if only someone would develop an open-source Web client for Jabber to supplement the Java applets like enigma3, JabberApplet, and GreenThumb. Ah well, I suppose we can't have everything all at once.
By the way, I won't publish the Jabber Journal next week. Expect issue #4 on or about December 6.
Jabber on!
--stpeter