Jabber Journal #22 (2005-04-08)

The Jabber juggernaut rolls on!

Those of you who read my weblog or Planet Jabber know that I've started writing about Jabber/XMPP news more frequently in weblog entries entitled "IMbox" (that's a play on "inbox"). Somehow it's easier for me to write in my weblog than it is to write the Jabber Journal, but don't worry: I will continue to publish the Journal, too.

Since I published Jabber Journal #21 about six weeks ago, there has been a lot of Jabber/XMPP activity, and from some significant players in the computing world: Sun Microsystems has released an XMPP server (more here and here), Macromedia has added XMPP support to ColdFusion (see also Coversant's ColdFusion compatibility work), the Eclipse IDE for Java development now includes XMPP support, Portuguese ISP SAPO has launched SAPO Messenger, email hosting service FuseMail now supports IM using Jabber/XMPP -- and there are more such announcements on the way (sorry, I can't tell you about them yet).

But development is not limited to big software companies. The Jabber/XMPP community continues to create a lot of interesting software. In the last six weeks alone I count the following releases: aspsms-t 0.9.74, Chatopus 1.82 and 1.83, Coccinella 0.95.5, Echomine Muse 0.81, Exodus 0.9.1, gajim 0.6.1, IM+ for Symbian, Jabber Bookmark Directory 0.1, Jabber Mail Component 0.1.1, Jabber-Net 0.08, jabberd 1.4.4-RC1, jabberd 2.0s7, Jabberzilla2 0.4, JBother 0.8.6, Jive Messenger 2.1.2, Jogger Publishing Assistant 0.4.9, kf 0.5.2, Locus 0.64, Miranda 0.4, Mule 1.0-rc3, Punjab 0.5, Smack 1.5, WhisperIM 0.2, WP-JabberBot 2.6, and XIFF 2.0 beta 2. Whew, that's a lot of coding!

Even with all the good things happening in the Jabber/XMPP world, we still have a lot of work to do. Here are what I think need to be priorities over the next 12 months:

  1. We need friendlier, more complete clients (or at least one or two such clients on every major computing platform).
  2. We need more reliable servers that are easy to install and configure (Jive Messenger seems to be a good step in that direction).
  3. We need to make it easier for people to register Jabber accounts and get started on the network.
  4. We need to make it easier for people to define their online profiles and to find other interesting people on the network.
  5. We need to deploy existing security features (e.g., SSL/TLS) more widely and we need one common protocol for end-to-end encryption.

One item missing from that list is voice and video integration. While a lot of people express an interest in multimedia, personally I think we need to focus on our core messaging and presence infrastructure first, which is why I am actively working on the last three items in that list (I leave all the hard coding work to people who know more than I do!).

Best of all, there are many ways for everyone in the Jabber/XMPP community to contribute. So let's get busy! :-)

--stpeter