We regret to announce that for certain reasons we have had to temporarily disable registration of new user accounts on the jabber.org IM service.

Existing users will still be able use the server as normal, barring changing passwords and removing their account. (If you are an existing user and need assistance feel free to join our chat room at jabber@conference.jabber.org).

This measure is only temporary, and we hope to restore full service as soon as possible.

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We have made Minichat available just to demonstrate new stuff we are working on, to do some tests and collect your opinions. The feedback we have got exceeded our expectations. The most common question was: Can I/how can I install it on my website?

Installing the Minichat on your website is very simple so I am putting here instructions for all of you who want to include the Minichat client on your website and allow visitors to chat with you.

Just to remind you - this code is still under development and will be updated and changed very often. It may even stop working temporarily or permanently. We can even intentionally block certain users or IP addresses if we discover any abuse. If you are ready for this and still want to have it continue reading...

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There’s another part to ACAP beyond configuration, though. ACAP allows you to share bookmarks, for example, with anyone else on the same server, or with anyone at all, anywhere. It’s a precursor, in this respect, to the social bookmarking sites like Delicious, but with several key differences.

The most obvious of these is that the owner of the data remains in control of it at all times. If you want to stop sharing your data, then you simply stop sharing it. There’s no complicated privacy agreements involved here, it’s your account, and quite possibly on your server.

Admittedly, I’m a particular fan of people running their own servers. I should call this concept MicroServers™, and make myself famous for a new Meme™, but I actually call it Common Sense™. The real reason I think people should run MicroServers™ is to be in control of their own data, which just seems to me to be a pretty basic thing to want to do, and not some terribly dramatic new concept at all.

So, anyway - you do lose the rather nice feature of the social networking sites to aggregate and statistically analyse data. For example, there’s no way to see how many people have bookmarked the same thing. But that’s actually okay, because you’re free to grant the rights to social bookmarking entities to see your data and analyse it.

Now PEP also allows people to share data or keep it private. The neat thing is that we can share it by default with anyone who wants it from our roster. Given that these are the people who are - probably - our friends, that means in turn that this is probably a good mapping. Moreover, this is more powerful than ACAP can provide, because it’s allowing data sharing beyond people on the same server, without forcing such data to be simply public.

In a PEP-replaces-ACAP world, then, your browser’s bookmark and your “social bookmarks” are one and the same thing. You can choose to share your bookmarks with anyone you choose, including - most interestingly - social bookmark aggregators, one or more of them, which will take your data, analyse it, and provide aggregations and statistics.

No more closed data silos, just aggregation and statistical services - of course essentially the same privacy issues, but you could at least change from one to another easily, even if the old aggregator could keep a snapshot of your data if it wasn’t playing nicely.

I’ve always maintained that I’m not wed to ACAP. I don’t like ACAP because I wrote a server, I like ACAP because it stops me swearing at my client when I switch from desktop to laptop. (Which I do a lot). That’s why I started using it, and that’s why I wrote a server. (And a client library. And a client that used it. And so on.)

In terms of investment of time, I’ve put a lot into ACAP. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’d be loathe to chuck it all away. But the truth of the matter is that, while I rather like a lot of the design of ACAP, the thing I particularly like about it is what it does. It means that when I configure my email client, I’m configuring my email client. Not “my copy of Polymer on my desktop”, but “my email client”. In principle, whichever ACAP-supporting email client I choose to use, wherever I choose to use it.

The thing I particularly *don’t* like about it is that nobody, and no clients, use it - I still run one of four or five full ACAP servers on the planet, and I wrote all of them. (Unless someone’s going to tell me they run Cyrus smlACAPd. In which case I shall be impressed). Only Polymer does a full job of ACAP, although actually, most ACAP users are Mulberry users - Mulberry doesn’t do standard configuration, so the magical interop is lost. A shame - I don’t think Polymer is perfect for everyone all the time, but email clients have to try to break the Barnum law, and please all the people all the time, and that’s why, I think, all of them suck.

But what would be great is if there were a protocol that did essentially the same thing as ACAP, but did so in a way that somehow avoided The Great Bootstrap Problem, so that it was relatively easy to get to a point where all clients supported it, and so you could decide to use, say, Thunderbird for reading your mail, and Polymer for organizing it, and they’d both use the same accounts, colour your messages the same, use the same flags, etc.

And luckily, there is. Sort of.

PEP, core of the rich presence support in XMPP, provides the basics of what’s needed. It means that every email client, web browser, etc would all become an XMPP client (although not an IM client), which would be quite amusing, but they’d pick up bookmarks, IMAP configurations, etc all from PEP.

To be fair, not everything is there, but PEP does look like a pretty good base. Things missing:

• Offline support
• Better synchronization
• Microformats for data
• Other stuff I haven’t thought of

None of these are as critical, or as hard, as you might think, though. Offline support and better sync basically are accomplished by the same mechanism that allows client-side caching to improve bandwidth, which we need for mobile rich presence anyway.

Microformats are pretty easy to define, because we have the starting point of the ACAP dataset class definitions, which were arrived at by sufficient people thinking about not only how email clients (for example) are configured, but how they ought to be, too. And since dataset-classes map quite simply onto XML, this is nice and easy.

I suppose, given a nice website in pastel blue with rounded corners and bright green/orange highlights, that we could probably solve this in a couple of weeks. Anyone fancy tackling it?

We are pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.5.1, now with even more openness! This release represents the first stage of the Enterprise plugin split into open source plugins. We're very excited to be able to provide these to everyone for free, and seeing what the community does with them, both in terms of contributed code and use case scenarios. So lets talk about some specifics.

New Plugins!

• Monitoring: Adds support for server statistics and chat archiving and reports.
• Fastpath: Support for managed queued chat requests, such as a support team might use.

These are the first two pieces of the open sourced Enterprise plugin. Client management is coming very soon, as is clustering. SparkWeb will also be released tomorrow as a separate product. So you might be wondering, hey, why is there an Openfire Enterprise 3.5.1? Well, due to the lack of all of the plugins being available right now, we've provide 3.5.1 for existing enterprise customers to make use of. It includes some important clustering fixes though! (as will the clustering plugin when it is release)

Important, Seriously, Pay Attention, Read This
If you install the Monitoring and/or Fastpath plugin, make absolute sure that you read the readme first! There are included instructions for how to migrate your database from the Enterprise plugin to the new plugin database tables. If you have ever run the Enterprise plugin or the old Fastpath plugin before it was integrated with Enterprise, make sure you don't forget this or you will be unhappy!

Big Connection Manager Improvements
The connection managers have been updated to bring HTTP binding up to date and a couple of library upgrades that include a number of improvements. It is important to note though that the conf/manager.xml file has been updated and you will need to update yours as well. The new http binding section that you will need to add is described here.

Ok Fine, Where Do I Get It?
You can download Openfire 3.5.1 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.5.1 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.

We are pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.5.1! This release represents the release of the open sourced Enterprise components, as separate plugins. It also includes fixes for the s2s issues (especially with gmail.com) that plagued 3.5.0! For more details, please read the blog post here. You can view the full change log here.

It is important that you update the following plugins with this release if you are upgrading from pre-3.5.0, as some APIs have changed:

• IM Gateway
• User Search
• MOTD
• SIP

It is also very important that you read the README for the following two new plugins, as they explain how to migrate from the Enterprise plugin to the new open source plugins:

• Monitoring
• Fastpath

Note that Openfire Enterprise 3.5.1 is also available. This is available until the other components of Enterprise are released. (Clustering and Client Management) They will be released soon. SparkWeb will be released tomorrow as a separate product.

Download Openfire from here.
Download Openfire Enterprise from here.
Download Connection Manager from here

Enjoy!

Openfire Team

We experienced an outage of our IM server today. Analysis reveals that the cause was corrupt data in the "private data storage" module, which is used to store information such as client preferences and chatroom bookmarks. We are working to restore this private data, but until we do certain information may not be available to your Jabber client. Our apologies for the outage.

We have just installed the Minichat - simple web client on the Tigase website. It allows anybody who visits the website to chat with "admin" - me ;-). No user name, no password is required. Just click to connect to the XMPP/Jabber server and you can start conversation.

This is the AJAX application created using GWT (Google Web Toolkit). It connects to the XMPP server via Bosh and signs in using SASL Anonymous.

This is our first version of the client and we are going to move things further to add fully functional AJAX client to Tigase project. The AJAX client and the XMPP library written in GWT is also available under GPLv3 license and will be released publicly very soon.

Please have a look, experiment and let us know what you think...

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Almost one year ago, the new Coccinella website was launched (1). Since then you were provided with nearly 6 Coccinella releases: 0.96.0, 0.96.2, 0.96.4, 0.96.4.1, and 0.96.6 (2) of which 2 were synchronised releases. It was a productive year.

The website itself was also a success with increasing numbers of people discovering Coccinella and XMPP. However, not everything went as fluently. In the summer of 2007 you could not access the website during nearly a whole week (3) due to major troubles with our former hosting provider (VistaPages). Read more in our VistaPages Review (summary: VistaPages sucks).

Speaking of reviews Coccinella also was reviewed by a popular Czech website (4), Lifehacker.com (5), and others. Luckily, and obviously, we came much better out of these reviews than VistaPages came out of ours.

PS: A new Coccinella release is in the pipelines. So it's time for you to download the daily breakfast build and start bug hunting!

Earlier today I exported our svn repository for SparkWeb and committed the intial import to the new open source repository! Instructions for getting and building the source are available. Getting and Building SparkWeb. A chat room for discussion of SparkWeb development can be found at sparkweb@conference.igniterealtime.org. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community can do!

As summer 2008 approaches, students have been busy applying, the XSF has been busy scoring applications, and mentors have been busy preparing. It’s time again for Google’s Summer of code, a scheme to pay students to work on open source code for the summer, and hopefully for them to continue contributing afterwards. This year has [...]

Version 0.3 of XEP-0237: Roster Sequencing has been released.

This specification proposes a modification to the XMPP roster management protocol to support sequencing of roster changes for more efficient downloading of the roster information.

The changelog is:

Defined protocol solely in terms of full rosters and roster pushes (no more roster diffs); added implementation notes; clarified server behavior if cached version is unavailable. (psa)

For the fourth year in a row, the XMPP Standards Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code. Our projects for 2008 are as follows:

• Mateusz Biliński — Plug-in system for Gajim (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Adam Czachorowski — Metacontacts support and various roster
  improvements for Psi (Mentor: Remko Tronçon)
• Tomas Karasek — Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP (XEP-0124) support in Gajim Jabber client (Mentor: Yann LeBoulanger)
• Aleksey Palazchenko — Psi: Message history (Mentor: Kevin Smith)
• Safa Sofuoğlu — Updating and Improving BOSH Support of Openfire (Mentor: Gaston Dombiak)
• Paweł Wiejacha — Themable WebKit-based Chat Dialogs (Mentor: Kevin Smith)

Here’s to another successful summer of coding!

agsXMPP supports lots of platforms which currently include Windows, Linux (Mono) and Windows-Mobile. And the next version I am currently working on will also support Microsoft Silverlight.

This opens new possibilities to xmpp web development.

I attached a small screenshot which shows agsXMPP for SIlverlight in action. Follow this blog for updates.

Version 0.6 of XEP-0154: User Profile has been released.

This document specifies how to represent and manage profile data about IM users and other XMPP entities using the XMPP Data Forms extension.

The changelog is:

Updated to reflect stable PEP protocol; added OpenID field; specified XML schema; changed namespace to conform to XMPP Registrar procedures. (psa)

Version 0.9 of XEP-0181: Jingle DTMF has been released.

This specification defines an XML format for encapsulating Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) events in informational messages sent within the context of Jingle audio sessions, e.g. to be used in the context of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.

The changelog is:

Removed negotiation flow so that this specification describes only the XMPP transport of DTMF events; added error flows to be used if the code is not understood or if a non-XMPP method is preferred. (psa)

The previously mentioned problem with legacy SSL connections to the jabber.org IM service has been solved. You can now connect again to port 5223. But if your client was unable to connect during the outage, you may want to file a feature request for STARTTLS support. :)

Yeah, bugger off, James - you’re apparently the only person to use that phrase, according to Google.

But thanks for using your twitter stalkers to find me Library Thing, even if it means I actually owe Bill Thompson a thank-you, which is a strange position I never thought I’d be in…

Apologies for the slightly scatty tone of this…

So I’ve noticed mention of APML recently, quite a lot. APML is a markup language which is intended to tell the world what your attention is on - as in, what music you’re listening to, or what paint you’re watching dry. This is what they call Attention Profiling, and what everyone else in the universe calls rich presence. My only problem with these things is that I can never be bothered filling them in, of which more later.

Now, PEP, being a personal rich presence source, can also supply much of this kind of thing. But it does so by slicing it - User Tune, for instance, provides music data - and just music data.

Now this kind of thing is handy, because it allows subscribers - who may not care that it’s “Dulux Timeless Matt Emulsion” that I’m currently watching dry - to express interest only in the bits they care about. This in turn means fewer network packets flying about, etc. This is Good.

But for people who really want a full APML “stream”, that’s not so good, because they have to peice it back together. So I’m vaguely thinking that this might impact how we (XMPP folk) consider the arrangement of Rich Presence in PEP, and how we arrange it such that it’s possible to rebuild, simply and easily a full (or partial) APML feed.

On top of that, as shocking as it may seem, not everybody listens to their own unique bit of music, for example. Many of us listen to what are known as “radio stations”, and some of us, eschewing paint drying, watch devices called “televisions”, upon which we view both “films” and “programmes”. (Cue en_US spell checker whining). We also read “books”. I know, it’s weird, but there’s bound to be more commonality in what we do than disparity.

So… What I was wondering was… Take a look at BBC Programmes. Now, if we could say “Hey, I’m watching Charlie and Lola” instead - and I’m not, but it’s a pretty good show - then what you have is the BBC acting as a source for me to consume with my attention. I don’t have to fill in loads of data anymore, because I can grab that URI directly off my Freeview programme stream (almost), so in principle my client can just do it - and Freeview becomes a Distraction feed.

I just hope Dulux produce a distraction feed.

Over the last few days, client connections to the legacy SSL port (5223) have not been working at the jabber.org IM service. We will get this back up and running as soon as possible. However, secure connections to port 5222 (using STARTTLS) are working fine.