We know the question is on everyone's minds: what happened to the Jabber Journal?! Never fear, your friendly writer/editor/publisher has not forgotten. It's just that he's been awfully busy writing protocol documents for the IETF's XMPP Working Group. As soon as some looming deadlines pass, we'll be right back on schedule.
It's been over a month since the last issue of the Jabber Journal, so as you might imagine much water has passed under the bridge. There have been plenty of new software releases, several new and updated JEPs, and a spate of commercial announcements, not to mention happenings within the XMPP WG. So let's dive in...
On the JEP front, Peter Millard has been busy with Service Discovery and Pubsub, we've received a proposal for SOAP over Jabber, and your friendly editor has published new or revised proposals for Multi-User Chat, Message Events, Flexible Offline Message Retrieval, and XHTML IM. All this while performing major surgery on material regarding SASL, TLS, privacy lists, roster management, subscriptions, and error handling in the Internet-Drafts (more on them next time). Whew!
Software developers have been no less busy than protocol geeks over the last month. The JabberPy library for Python and JSO library for Java both saw new versions. Several new server projects started up: ejabberd (written in Erlang) and WPJabber (a pthreads fork of the venerable JabberD 1.4 codebase) -- and let us not forget the recently-released JabberD Quickstart package, which provides an easy-to-install, easy-to-configure Jabber server for those who prefer GUI to CLI. Another new project of note is JPT, which is devoted to building a WAP gateway to Jabber functionality. A bit farther afield, the GNU libidn library now supports the XMPP stringprep profiles for nodeprep (usernames) and resourceprep (client resources), which puts Jabber at the cutting edge of interationalized network addresses.
In deployment land, February also witnessed the launch of yet another IPv6 Jabber server, located at jabber.ngnet.it in Italy (the first IPv6 servers were those run by Matthias Wimmer at charente.de, amessage.de, and several other domains). Speaking of international exposure, the jabber.dk and jabber.freenet.de Jabber servers also recently came on line. And a new website at jabber.ro was launched recently to provide Jabber information for folks in Romania. By the way, you can find a list of public, open-registration Jabber servers here (now also available as XML in the Jabber service discovery format for easy loading into Jabber clients).
There is quite a bit to report on regarding commercial adoption, but for now you'll have to read the news page to catch up on that. Why? Because your friendly editor needs to get back to work on the XMPP Internet-Drafts, that's why! But we do promise to be back soon. We really do.
Until then, Jabber on!
--stpeter