Ah, there's nothing like a good flame war to get the juices flowing! This week discussion exploded on both the Standards-JIG and XMPP WG mailing lists regarding proposed additions to the Jabber/XMPP protocol. It's been hard to keep up at times, but in the end the discussions have been productive.
The Standards-JIG discussion was precipitated by the Last Call I issued for the Direct TCP JEP written by Justin Karneges -- just one of many proposals for initiating bytestreams between clients for things like file transfer. The threads that start here, here, and here will keep you reading late into the night. In an attempt to stop the madness, Dave Smith posted a proposal for using standard TCP sockets for bytestreaming, which in turn generated much discussion. However, it seems that consensus is forming, which will be helped along by the expected JEP that will flesh out Dave's proposal. The conversation continues...
In IETF-land, the XMPP WG continues to plow ahead. After the release of new Internet-Drafts for both core and IM last Friday, discussion this week revolved around whether the Internet-Drafts MUST include coverage of in-band registration (the consensus is no) and formatted text (consensus yet to emerge). It's good to see that many of the recent additions to the specs (such as SASL authentication) are not generating much controversy. The next big addition will be the protocol for supporting TLS (à la the deferred JEP-0035), which Rob Norris has promised to post about soon. So don't touch that dial! (Speaking of the IETF, I forgot to mention the successful experiment of hosting Jabber-based groupchat rooms to supplement the real-life discussions at IETF 55 in Atlanta recently. Hopefully that will become a fixture at future IETF meetings.)
OK, we're almost through the protocol section of this week's report, so hang in there! Lost in the bytestream explosion this week are a number of intriguing new JEPs. Peter Millard released the first draft of a long-awaited new proposal for generalized Publish-Subscribe functionality in Jabber. Pub-sub, as it's affectionality known, will enable Jabber to offer a wide range of new features including better news headlines, CVS notifications, NNTP gateways, weblog integration, and much more. So I hope that after the bytestream discussion dies down, people will turn their attention to pub-sub. In addition, Jer published a proposal for multi-user stickie notes and the aforementioned Rob Norris published not one, not two, but three JEPs on packet filtering to replace the almost-forgotten mod_filter module in the jabberd server. It would be really cool if this kind of filtering could be released as part of jabberd2.
In JSF news, the marketing committee and the compliance committee made good progress this week in defining the JSF sponsorship program as well as compliance standards for Jabber software (they meet on Mondays and Tuesdays respectively at 18:00 UTC in the foundation@conference.jabber.org room if you'd like to join the conversation). But the biggest news is that the Board of Directors signed a letter of intent with Jabber Inc. that will lead to eventual transfer of the Jabber trademark to the Jabber Software Foundation. This is a major step forward in community stewardship and will make potential contributors much more comfortable with adding value to the world of Jabber. It also bespeaks real courage on the part of Jabber Inc. (how many companies would willingly hand over administration and ownership of such a key piece of intellectual property?), and JSF Board member Tony Bamonti deserves a lot of the credit for making this happen.
On to software. Last week I neglected to mention the new 0.8 release of Exodus, so if you're running that client be sure to upgrade -- this was a major release. Other software packages upgraded recently are the JAJC client for Windows, the Mac version of Psi, RhymBox for Windows, and centericq for Unix (it will run on MacOS X, too!). There's probably more software that I've missed, so keep those cards and letters coming.
In sum, the Jabber community continues to grow. Relative newcomers are contributing JEPs and coding up new uses for Jabber like Ulrich Staudinger's business data interchange gateway with support for ebXML, SAP iDoc, and EDIFACT. Relative oldtimers continue to contribute things like Chris Pile's PAM authentication patch for jabber 1.4.2. And I've seen quite a bit of discussion and development occurring on other projects as well, such as the AIM Transport and the Nitro client for OS X. It's great to see more developers getting involved with Jabber, especially since December is usually a quiet time of year in the open source world. Now if only more folks would step forward to help out with things like the MSN Transport. Personally, I think we will see a lot more contributors join the Jabber world in 2003 -- when well-known personages like Dave Winer casually mention that Jabber support is among their coolest new features and major corporations start using Jabber (word is that the Sprint IM service is the latest major adoption), people notice. So get ready for a busy New Year!
And, as always, Jabber on!
--stpeter