Welcome back! This is Jabber Journal number nine ... number nine ... number nine (sorry, that's a Yoko Ono joke).
As you may know, over the last two months the Jabber Software Foundation has conducted two surveys, one for end users and one for server admins. We're still analyzing the results, but the surveys have definitely helped us learn more about the people who use Jabber technologies. Plus now we have some hard numbers to prove what kinds of features people want. In general people are happy with Jabber, but there is no reason to be complacent -- much work remains to be done before the Jabber community achieves world domination! Check out the survey result pages for all the details.
If you would like to learn from key Jabber contributors in person, mark your calendar now for the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003 in Portland, Oregon (July 7-11). There will be Jabber presentations by Jeremie Miller, Harold Gottschalk, and yours truly, a half-day Jabber tutorial by Ryan Eatmon and Peter Millard, and a talk by longtime Jabberites DJ Adams and Piers Harding. Thanks to generous support from Jabber Inc., the Jabber Software Foundation will host a booth on the convention floor where we'll be spreading the Jabber gospel to anyone who will listen (let us know if you'd like to demo your software there). And you can be sure that the many Jabber developers in attendance will be holding enough late-night hackfests to really help you get in touch with your inner geek. Don't miss it!
In overseas news, I have to ask: what is going on in Poland? Jabber has exploded in popularity there, with several active code projects, many servers, and hundreds of thousands of users (indeed, the jabber.wp.pl server alone hosts over 500,000 users!). For all the latest news, visit JabberPL.org. The last month has also witnessed a number of server launches in other countries, including the first public Jabber server in Kazakhstan (jabber.unesco.kz).
In the world of Jabber software projects, there is a new small C library called Loudmouth; developers have been asking a good C library for a long time, so this is great news! Thanks to hard work by Rob Norris, the jabberd2 server project continues to inch ever closer toward version 2.0 (the latest release is alpha 4, so keep on testing and filing bug reports). Not be outdone, Jonathan Pobst recently released version 0.2.2 of Joey, an open-source Jabber server for Windows. Never enough servers. :-)
Commercial adoption of Jabber technologies and the core Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) continues to proceed at a fast pace. Software development companies like Antepo, Jive Software, Movial, The Kompany, Tipic, and Winfessor are releasing quite a bit of software based on Jabber and XMPP. Unfortunately, many of the large companies that are using Jabber/XMPP have not yet publically announced their support, but we can expect that to change when the XMPP Internet-Drafts are approved by the IETF. So the rapid progress being made by the XMPP Working Group is good news indeed (more details next time, but in the meantime you can always read those Internet-Drafts if you have trouble sleeping!).
Finally, you may have noticed that the Jabber Software Foundation has a new logo. The JSF held a logo contest in February that resulted in 100 entries. In the end the members of the JSF decided to retain the long-time Jabber theme of a lightbulb, which emblematic of the concept of presence that is at the heart of real-time communications. The winning entry was designed by Andy Muldowney. The JSF is now working to incorporate the new look into all of its materials, and plans to create T-shirts and other "swag" as time and finances permit.
BTW, in my weblog the other day I promised to publish the Jabber Journal once every two weeks, just as Doc Searls does with his SuitWatch newsletter. We'll see if I can keep that up, but at least it's a worthy goal.
Jabber on!
--stpeter