Happy Birthday, Jabber!
For those of you keeping track, yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the original Slashdot story announcing the formation of the Jabber open-source server project (now known as jabberd). So Jabber technologies are now five years old (or five years young if you like that better).
We've accomplished quite a bit since Jeremie announced the existence of Jabber back in 1999. Various versions of the original jabberd server have been downloaded 250,000 times (though now there are at least five other open-source implementations as well as several commercial implementations), there are thousands of Jabber server deployments on the Net today, millions of people use Jabber clients for instant messaging, nearly 10,000 people have subscribed to various Jabber mailing lists and posted nearly 150,000 messages, hundreds of Jabber software projects have sprung up (many hosted at JabberStudio), organizations large and small are using Jabber technologies for a wide range of near-real-time messaging projects, and the core Jabber protocols (formalized under the name XMPP) are nearing finalization within the Internet Engineering Task Force (look for more news about that soon).
But we are far from done! Some of the needs expressed in last year's end-user survey have yet to be addressed (such as easier ways for users to find each other). For others, such as file transfer, we have developed protocols but they have not yet been implemented in enough clients to make a big difference in the lives of Jabber users. On the plus side, more and more Jabber clients are improving their support for internationalized character sets (e.g., the Exodus translations), several web clients have emerged recently (as reported in Jabber Journal #15), work continues on an IRC gateway (based on the mu-conference code), the XMPP specs include improved channel security and authentication, and more clients have implemented the existing PGP protocol for message encryption.
Naturally, as more organizations and communities adopt Jabber technologies, they voice their interest in extending or expanding the range of functionality we support. One example is the academic community, as represented by work within Internet2; this community is interested in more robust authorization protocols (probably using the Security Assertion Markup Language, similar to the Internet2 Shibboleth initiative), pseudonymous addresses (so that students can chat with professors in confidence), and true federation of Jabber servers across domains. Another example is the military community -- but of course I can't tell you what they're interested in. ;-)
In other news, the jabber.org website has a new, more detailed list of server implementations -- expect an improved client list in the next few weeks. Speaking of servers and clients, the jabberd2 server is nearing final release, and I've noticed a number of new and improved clients recently, including updated versions of Tkabber, BuddySpace, neos mt, Gabber 2, and Psi -- as well as the first Jabber-aware release of UNIVerse, which bills itself as a 3D IM client. There is also a great new project called JabberNuke, which is working to integrate Jabber functionality into the PHP-Nuke content management system.
I expect 2004 to be yet another year of growth and change in the Jabber community. But I'm not making any New Year's resolutions -- we simply need to keep working hard to extend Jabber technologies in new directions, make existing implementations more robust, and encourage more organizations to adopt Jabber/XMPP as their messaging system of choice.
As always, Jabber on!
--stpeter