Welcome back!
As usual, the Jabber Journal has been quiet, but the Jabber community has been busy. Apple's release of iChat AV 3.0 (with Jabber support) soon after Jabber Journal #22 generated quite a bit of interest and activity, including a FAQ introducing iChat users to Jabber, guides to using Jabber gateways with iChat and running a Jabber server on OS X, and much more. Commercial software developers who have also released Jabber/XMPP code recently include JSF sponsors like Coversant, Jabber Inc., and Tipic. Both Antepo and Jabber Inc. have announced interoperability agreements with AOL Instant Messenger, which is a testament to the increasing market power of Jabber/XMPP deployments at leading-edge adopters of IM technology such as major investment banks, large enterprises, and the U.S. government.
One of the strengths of the Jabber/XMPP community is that it includes many kinds of developers, and the open-source (and freeware/shareware) folks have been just as busy as the commercial entities. Since early April I've noticed releases of jabberd 1.4.4, ejabberd 0.9, Gaim 1.3, Miranda 0.4, Chatopus 1.85, a new C library called libstrophe, a new C++ library called Gloox, an SMS gateway called aspsms-t, an HTTP binding implementation called Tonneru, a new IRC gateway project written in Python, Jeti 0.6.4 and JBother 0.8.7 (two different Java clients), Gajim 0.7.1, continued work on the Jabber/XMPP support in the Twisted framework, and probably many things I'm forgetting about right now. Plus, third-party tools like the Tsunami load tester, the ServerMojo monitoring system, the OpenIT management application, the Luntbuild software build tool, and the SAM Jr log monitor all support Jabber in one way or another. Heck, even the old NewtonIM client has been updated recently! (Yes, people still use the Newton.)
When I speak at conferences (such as last week's Collaborative Technologies Conference in New York) or I participate in question-and-answer sessions (as I did in the weekly Jive Messenger chat on May 25), people often ask me about the adoption of Jabber/XMPP technologies. Standard questions include:
"How many Jabber users are there?" -- We estimate at least ten milllion, but it's hard to know since Jabber is a distributed technology ... after all, how many email users are there? We do know that open-source Jabber server code been downloaded over 400,000 times and that there are at least 10,000 active servers on the public Jabber network, but many Jabber servers are running behind firewalls or on company intranets, so we don't have firm numbers.
"What are some of the big Jabber deployments?" -- Here again, it's not always possible to measure what's happening, because (as you can imagine) lots of organizations don't want to talk about what they're doing. I do know that most of the big Wall Street firms use Jabber/XMPP technologies (e.g., one groupchat room per trading desk) and some of them consider their IM deployments to be more mission-critical than their phone systems! Big companies like AT&T, EDS, FedEx, HP, Oracle, and Sun depend on their Jabber-based IM systems for daily communication. Many branches of the U.S. government (e.g., U.S. Army Future Combat Systems and the CapWIN emergency management network) are deploying or experimenting with Jabber/XMPP technologies. And a number of large ISPs and telecommunications providers (such as France Telecom, BellSouth, and Orange) have used XMPP as the basis for mobile IM as well as innovative services such as push-to-talk.
So you can see that Jabber/XMPP technologies are extremely popular among those who need to deploy real-world solutions today. While that popularity has not yet translated into consumer-oriented services that can compete with AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, I firmly believe it is only a matter of time before Jabber is adopted much more widely by the average IM user. Can you say world domination? ;-)
Jabber on!
--stpeter
