Rootkit!
Yes, we recently discovered that the machine hosting the jabber.org website as well as the JabberStudio service had been hacked. Over the last month, we've been working hard to restore service, but unfortunately there's still work to be done (e.g., JabberStudio is still down). This security breach has wasted a lot of time for the jabber.org administrators, but thankfully the broader Jabber community has been productively working away!
On the software front, the last two months have seen several new releases of Gaim, Psi 0.93, Coccinella 0.95.3, Gajim 0.4.1, JBother 0.8.5, the ngIM client from a company called XMPP Solutions, the WhisperIM client (which offers secure IM), and agsXMPP (a new XMPP code library written in C#). A company in Italy is working on an XMPP-based offering called Createmotions, which seems promising (or at least pretty). It appears that Macromedia (developers of Flash and other real-time technologies) may be adding XMPP support to some of its products (more here). SMS@active has launched a Jabber-based IM service called SMS T-Bar. And AppGate has added mobile IM to its corporate security solutions. Perhaps most importantly given recent events in Southeast Asia, PubSub.com has announced an experimental service for sending immediate notification of earthquakes over XMPP.
The server space has been perhaps even busier. Sun Microsystems has released its XMPP-based IM solution, called Sun Java System Instant Messaging and (we'd bet) written in Java. Code Cobra has released a GPL-licensed server also written in Java and named chime (short for "Corporate Hardened Instant Messaging Engine"). Adding to the list of Java XMPP servers, Tigase has been made available at java.net, aiming to provide full compliance with the XMPP RFCs. Not to be outdone, version 2.1.1 of the increasingly popular Java server Jive Messenger was recently released, as well.
And of course there is plenty of activity on non-Java servers. JSF sponsor Coversant is getting good coverage for its SoapBox Server, and JSF sponsor Jabber Inc. has released version 4.1 of its flagship server product. On the open-source side of the Jabber community, rumor has it that an updated release of the original jabberd 1.x server is planned soon, with much improved XMPP compliance. There is now a Fink package of Alexey Shchepin's ejabberd server (ejabberd is also included in the REPOS collection and forms the foundation for the J-EAI integration tool, as described in a recent talk at the Erlang User Conference). And Justin Karneges, mainly known as developer of the Psi client, has written a proof-of-concept server in C++ named Ambrosia, based on the Iris library that powers Psi. (Speaking of whom, Justin Kirby has published interviews with both Alexey Shchepin and Justin Karneges at his weblog recently -- watch Planet Jabber for further interviews.)
The Jabber network continues to expand rapidly. Open servers I've heard about recently include freax.org, jabber.f-box.org, jabber.belnet.be (BELNET is the national research and education network of Belgium), jabber.minus273.org, jabber.wroc.pl, jabber-hispano.org, jabberlombia.ccasoft.org , jabberme.de, jaim.at, netmindz.net, seunet.org, silosoft.org, topup.ie, and and xmpp.us. Naturally, that list does not include the many, many servers that do not offer registration, such as the campus-only server at the University of Florida. There are thousands upon thousands of such servers, with more every day (in fact, the jabber.org server status page routinely shows over 1500 servers connected to jabber.org at any one time, which is a small fraction of the functioning servers on the Jabber network.
Jabber on!
--stpeter