As usual, my apologies for taking so long to write another issue of the Jabber Journal. My excuse this time is that I've been very busy with our work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Since the last issue in September, the IESG issued an IETF Last Call for the two main XMPP documents, which define all of the base protocols used by Jabber clients and servers as well as enhancements for security and internationalization developed by the XMPP Working Group. The IETF Last Call has ended, and these two Internet-Drafts are essentially complete now after many weeks of incorporating feedback from members of the IETF. The chairs of the XMPP WG have now also issued a Working Group Last Call on our two additional documents, which define a mapping to the IETF's CPIM specifications as well as a way to do end-to-end encryption using CPIM. Once that Working Group Last Call ends, the IESG will issue an IETF Last Call for those documents, too. It seems likely that the IESG will consider all four documents at once, which we hope will happen in January, so stay tuned for details! (A more complete report on our IETF work, which I sent to the members of the Jabber Software Foundation, is here.)
In other protocol news, the Publish-Subscribe JEP has advanced to a status of Draft, as have two file transfer proposals (JEP-0095 and JEP-0096). An additional proposal related to file transfer (In-Band Bytestreams) is currently being voted on by the Jabber Council and should advance to Draft soon as well. Other priorities for the next few months are some security proposals (such as encrypted chat sessions) and a replacement for vCards.
Based in large part on our work with the IETF, interest in Jabber technologies continues to grow. For example, I've talked recently with several people in various branches of the U.S. and British governments about their interest in deploying Jabber services. Companies large and small, from Communicator and Rhombus to giants like Oracle are developing software that incorporates support for the Jabber protocols.
But it's not just corporations, of course: the open-source community continues to thrive. Once upon a time, there was only one open-source Jabber server, and one client for each major desktop operating system. Now, I count at least four open-source servers under active development, two of which -- ejabberd (which now powers the jabber.ru server) and jabberd2 (the long-awaited re-write of the original jabberd server) -- are on target to support the entire XMPP specification soon. Work continues on components like mu-conference (groupchat), idavoll (pubsub), and proxy65 (file transfer). New clients continue to be released, such as DMSN (an open MSN client that now supports Jabber), JWGC (with a Zephyr interface), WebMessenger and Jabber Web Chat (two browser-based clients), as well as fun applications like Edgar (which enables you to provide your Jabber presence on a web page). I've even talked with a few people lately about using Jabber as a way to provide an interface to TTY telephones for the hearing-impaired.
Naturally, the Jabber network continues to grow, too. Thanks to equipment provided by HP, the jabber.org server has recently been upgraded. This has enabled us to accept more server-to-server connections. As our status page shows, we usually have connections open to 700 or more Jabber servers at any one time, out of the estimated tens of thousands of servers running on the Internet and company intranets. More Jabber servers come on line every week all over the world (the folks "down under" have been especially busy of late, with jabber.zim.net.au and jabber.org.au leading the way). Jabber technologies are also becoming increasingly popular in academia, for reasons that are well described by the folks at Azusa Pacific University. Expect to see the Jabber network grow even faster in the next year, as more and more companies realize the benefits of using Jabber technologies (especially once the XMPP Internet-Drafts move forward in the IETF).
Jabber on!
--stpeter