Monday, 9 February 2004
Completing the Dynamic Duo™
Today, the IESG announced
approved XMPP IM Internet Draft as IETF Proposed Standard. This
follows the recent
approval of XMPP Core. Together the two documents form the
basis of Jabber, and this
approval is a major milestone for the Jabber community, but also for
the general IM world. XMPP is the first IETF approved standard for
Instant Messaging.
So what is the difference between these two documents? Well,
Jabber is much more than IM. It is a generic XML routing platform. The
XMPP working group has tried to capture this thought by separating the
basis of Jabber in two parts.
XMPP Core defines how to communicate snippets of information using
a pair of streaming XML documents. It defines how to do secure
communication using TLS and SASL, describes the three basis
containers of information (<message>,
<iq> and
<presence>), and how to extend XMPP
Core to carry any kind of data, to support a wide range of
applications.
XMPP IM on the other hand, defines basic Instant Messaging
and Presence functionality based on XMPP Core. It gives more semantics
to the different containers and describes interactions with a server
to keep a roster of contacts, and selectively block communications to
or from another entity.
On top of these two documents, more enhanced protocols can be
build. The Jabber Software Foundation has a system for such
enhancements called Jabber Enhancement Proposals, and examples of
these are JEP-0045:
Multi-User Chat and JEP-0060:
Publish/Subscribe.
Again, I want to congratulate anyone involved with getting these
documents where they are now! The wait is for the RFC numbers to
match.
Jabber rocks, approvedly!
Educating from within
FOSDEM, the Free and Open
Software Developers Europe Meeting, is an annual conference in
Brussels. It is really a gathering of people interested in the
development of free and open software, with very good talks, and a nice
informal atmosphere. This year, the conference takes place on 21 and 22
february.
I've been to the last two editions, and really enjoyed it, but
only as a visitor. So, this year I am taking a different approach. I
took up the task of promoting Jabber at this year's edition
through various means.
Jabber server
First of all, on the 2003 edition, I talked to raphinou, the leading
man of the FOSDEM team, to do something with Jabber on this years
edition. He agreed that this would be nice. The result so far is the
FOSDEM Jabber server:
jabber.fosdem.org.
Everyone registered on the FOSDEM website automatically has a
Jabber account. With this, or any other Jabber account from
elsewhere, you can access the group chat rooms and meet other FOSDEM
participants. There is general chat at
hallway@conference.jabber.fosdem.org for both
before and during the event, and all conversations in the chatrooms
are logged for
later reference.
Besides the chat room logs, the website has a Getting Started page
with a list of Jabber clients, and some contact information. The
pages are written in DocBook
website and are processed using XSLT into XHTML.
Live reporting
During the two days of the conference, there will be a number of
chat rooms, corresponding to the physical rooms where the talks will
be held. Using the WiFi access points, this enables people in the
same talk to exchange ideas about the talk at hand. Also, it would
be great to get live reports from the talks in the chat room, so
people that are in another talk, or not even at FOSDEM, can still
attend the talk at least virtually.
Other goodies
Time permitting, I will be extending the services with stuff
I've been working on the last couple of years. I want to make a
local version of the Jabber World
Map, so people can publish their location and find others
on the conference grounds. Also, I want to make it easy for the
FOSDEM team to do announcements using a variant of Mimír.
Furthermore, dj, who did a Jabber
talk two years ago at FOSDEM and is attending
again this year, suggested to setup something like the Chump. Originally,
this is an IRC bot that allows the occupants of a chat room to
maintain a simple blog by interacting with the bot. Looking at it,
it looks really interesting, and I've contacted Edd Dumbill about the
existence of a Jabber variant. It seems the Chump team is working on
a version of Chump rewritten in the Twisted Framework.
Using the Twisted Jabber stuff from 
dizzyd, it should be easy to
make a Jabber Chump bot.
JSF Stand
Besides the FOSDEM Jabber server and its facilities, I'm also
busy setting up a Jabber Software Foundation stand on FOSDEM. With a
fancy table skirt featuring the JSF logo, and some informational
handouts, I hope to draw the attention of even more developers.
Seeing the recent approvement
by the IETF for XMPP Core, Jabber will get more attention in the
market place, and where better to start educating than the people
having to build stuff with Jabber.
I am particularly interested in the integration of Jabber into
the desktop. For example micke is working
on connecting GNOME's DBUS to Jabber. I will
definately be talking to micke on FOSDEM. I owe him a beer,
too.
Finally, Ulrich will be
giving a lightning talk on merging media streaming and Jabber in the
Jabber on
Helix project.