Triskaidekaphilics, rejoice! It's issue #13 of the Jabber Journal!
More than six weeks have elapsed since the last issue. Why the delay? The two main reasons are OSCON 2003 and IETF 57. The Jabber Software Foundation hosted a busy booth at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a number of prominent Jabberites presented talks and tutorials, hackfests went on late into the night (resulting in major progress on file transfer), and I talked with lots of interesting folks from other projects and companies, including SourceForge, the Helix Community (the open-source branch of Real Networks), the .LRN virtual classroom project, a gentleman from IBM who is authoring a Redbook that will recommend Jabber as an IM solution to small and medium-size businesses, the authors of the new Jabber Developer's Handbook (released the first day of the conference), and -- well, you get picture. Lots of great conversations started, which will continue over the coming months.
A mere 14 hours after returning from OSCON, I flew off to Vienna, Austria for IETF 57 (special thanks to the Günther, Maria, and everyone else at jabber.at for hosting the chatrooms). The meeting of the XMPP WG was uneventful (a serious lack of controversy is a good thing), and it seems that our four main Internet-Drafts will be reviewed by our Area Director in the coming weeks before being sent to the IESG for a vote. The main change I envision right now is the addition of a subscription state chart to draft-ietf-xmpp-im, though there may be some small changes here and there to the other drafts as well (mostly fixing typographical errors and such at this point). So it's full steam ahead on the XMPP front! (Once the XMPP docs are finalized, I'll need to write a document that defines the differences between XMPP and Jabber in areas such as authentication and session initiation -- look for that in the next month or two.)
Before we leave the world of protocols, I should note that many JEPs have been published and updated in the last six weeks or so. The big proposals have been stream initiation and a file transfer profile for stream initiation (both of which are part of the major file transfer progress noted above), a major security proposal for using XML Encryption over Jabber, and a last call on Publish-Subscribe (which enables us to do fun stuff such as user moods). The next big gap to fill is user profiles (which I just blogged about because I can't fit everything in the Jabber Journal!).
Of course, those who follow the Jabber community know it's about much more than just protocols. It includes tens of thousands of active Jabber servers all over the world, from small servers on company intranets to public servers such as the new server at jabber.or.kr. It includes advocacy sites like the awesome Jabber Australia. It includes people who write articles for technology magazines, such as Dustin Puryear's recent article in SysAdmin Magazine and an article in the current issue of the International PHP Magazine. It includes hundreds of developers, working on everything from jabberd2 (thanks, Rob!), to countless clients, to web projects such as webber and webmessenger, to projects that may not even seem like traditional Jabber efforts, such as the Haystack information manager and Jabber-powered painting robots (in Danish, no less). Heck, we'll even include journalists in the community, since they write such nice articles in e-Pro, Network Magazine, Instant Messaging Planet, Fortune, even the Wall Street Journal.
Jabber on!
--stpeter