A month has gone by since the last issue of the Jabber Journal, so I've already broken my promise to publish a new issue every two weeks. Sorry about that -- things get busy sometimes here in the Jabber world!
Last time we delved into the success Jabber technology has experienced in Poland. One factor I neglected to mention was the role of Wirtualna Polska, which has contributed quite a bit of code to the Jabber community (including a new PHP module that is now in CVS for its WPJabber server). WP is something like the Polish version of Yahoo!, with 6 million registered users, of whom half a million have signed up for WP's Jabber-based IM service. Now that's a lot of user!
In other software news, the last four weeks have seen new releases of a number of Jabber clients, including Nitro 0.5 (OS X), Exodus 0.8.5 (Windows), GreenThumb 2.4 (Java applet), wxSkabber 1.1.3 (Windows), TSIM (Windows), and centericq (Linux). And judging from all the activity I see on cvslog@jabberstudio.org, we might even see a new release of Gabber before long (perhaps the long-awaited Gabber2). As for code libraries and APIs, it seems that Jive Software has released a new version of its Smack API for Java. And Josiah Ritchie has started a cool project to collect server admin scripts. Finally, I noticed a new project for a SMS Transport (once again from Poland), and another one called idavoll that provides an open-source implementation of Peter Millard's Publish-Subscribe JEP (a.k.a. pubsub).
Speaking of JEPs, the Jabber Council is currently voting on Matthew Miller's Ad-Hoc Commands proposal, Rachel Sparks provided a nice small JEP on nested roster groups, I wrote one formalizing timestamps in Jabber, and Thomas Muldowney wrote a proposal for doing user avatars on top of pubsub. I think we'll see many more pubsub-related JEPs over the next few months, since pubsub makes it easy to do things like CVS notifications, RSS feeds, weblog events, and much more. BTW, if you're interested in following the latest protocol discussion, subscribe to the Standards-JIG mailing list or join the weekly "protocol gathering" (held every Tuesday at 22:00 UTC in the foundation@conference.jabber.org chatroom).
You may have noticed that three forward-thinking companies recently became sponsors of the Jabber Software Foundation: Antepo, Jive Software, and Winfessor. All three are software development companies who are building innovative technologies on top of the Jabber/XMPP protocol, and the Jabber community certainly welcomes their support. Look for more sponsors soon as organizations realize the importance of helping to advance the Jabber protocol and community.
On the protocol front, one of the major challenges facing the XMPP/Jabber community is the existence of SIMPLE, an instant messaging and presence protocol that is based on the Session Initiation Protocol and that has been embraced (and extended?) by Microsoft. Microsoft's support has led some analysts to prematurely declare SIMPLE as "the standard" for instant messaging, but that battle is far from over. Personally I don't see SIP/SIMPLE as "the enemy", since the SIMPLE folks at least are working on an open protocol (unlike our friends at AOL, which by the way is asking for regulatory relief regarding interoperability!). Unfortunately, SIMPLE has some major drawbacks as an IM technology, which are covered in depth by a new whitepaper published by Jabber, Inc.. Very interesting reading! (And if you're really a glutton for punishment, you can read a recent Internet-Draft that attempts to summarize how to actually build and deploy a SIMPLE-based IM system. Hint: it's anything but simple!)
Before we go, I simply must mention two applications are Jabber technology that are just way cool. One is Sputnik, a wireless access point that uses Jabber for authentication (as Joi Ito says, it rocks!). Another is InstaPix, which uses Jabber as the foundation for sharing photos in real time. Most people think of Jabber as just instant messaging, but in realityit's a whole lot more! (Just wait until we build calendaring and whiteboarding on top of Jabber, too...)
Well, I think that's enough for this issue. There's so much going on in the Jabber world that I really do need to publish the Jabber Journal every two weeks -- otherwise there's too much to write about. (And I haven't even gotten a chance to look at all the IBM articles someone pointed me to yesterday.) For more frequent updates, check out Google News, Blogging Headline News, the jabber.org news page (available as RSS and as a mailing list), or even my weblog (if you don't mind my political posts). Yes, you too can experience Jabber information overload!
Until next time, Jabber on!
--stpeter