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List:       jabber-jdev
Subject:    [JDEV] Jabber DevZone News - Jabber Developer News/Updates
From:       Jabber DevZone <webmaster () jabber ! org>
Date:       2001-06-28 21:04:58
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Jabber Developer News/Updates

The following was posted by jer@jabber.org via the Jabber DevZone web site (http://dev.jabber.org/):

First, the big news and draw of much attention has been the creation
of
the Jabber Foundation
. One of the first steps for the 136 members was to elect a Council,
and
now that group is creating the first set of JIGs, or Jabber Interest
Groups,
around some of the popular development/protocol topics: conferencing,
file
transfers, security, standards, text formatting, browsing, presence
management,
and more as there is demand. Another term you might see being used is
JEP,
which stands for a Jabber Enhancement Proposal, and might include
anything
from final protocol drafts from a JIG, informational items on the
architecture,
or requests from a group of individuals to create a new JIG around a
topic.
There will be more news posted on the JEP format and JIGS as they get
hammered
out. 


While many of us are busy clamoring around the foundation, protocols,
and future development direction, coding is continuing in the
background
at an amazing pace from all corners of the net. The 
Jabelin
project is well on it's way to producing some new solid server
components
and working towards a more flexible and dynamic "server" consisting of
various
interworking pieces. While that work on improved replacement parts
accelerates,
the existing 1.4 codebase is also getting a round of fixes and
cleanups.
A 1.4.3 release should hit the streets next month, with some
streamlining
of the xml processing back-end, updates to the internal threading/io
model
(less reliance on pth and signals), fixes for the (buggy) presence
caching
between resources, and some changes to the xdb/auth system making it
easier
to write new authentication back-ends. On the porting side, the 
win32-server
effort has also been making progress using the 1.4 codebase and
cygwin,
and 1.4.3 should compile and run cleanly on Darwin/OSX. 


Not only is the server maturing, but many clients have been getting
better
and better with every release. In the Gnome/C++ arena is 
Gabber
, which is now included in many distros and is very usable when it
comes
to IM client design. If you like perl, Jarl's
latest release has numerous visual fixes (including a text mode
instead
of tk) and wide protocol support, even some of the 
experimental drafts
. For win32, there's always JabberCOM
which has wide usage and support, and Winjab
for any delphi fans. There's also been lots of integration with other
popular
plug-in IM clients, such as everybuddy
and gaim
. On the Mozilla front, Jabberzilla
 has a new release and after an extensive rewrite, is fully integrated
with
the component architecture of Mozilla so that real-time IM/XML Jabber
functionality
can be extended anywhere behind the scenes. On OSX, 
JabberFoX
is progressing quickly as a very pluggable dynamic fully carbon
client.
Soon here, WCS
(Web Client Services) should reach a point where it's usable for
building
xml-rpc and fully web-integrated clients into any site. And there are
lots
more that I haven't mentioned (python, java, kde, etc), just 
search
for your favourite language or platform to find out where the activity
is.



Important upcoming events include, of course, 
JabberCon
. Myself and many others will be there, and I highly encourage finding
a
way to make it to this event if you aren't already coming. It'll be a
great
and useful time for everyone, developers and suits both. Also coming
up
before then is the popular Oreilly 
Open-Source Conference
. I'll be there in the Jabber booth and wandering around again this
year.
There are also numerous talks related to Jabber, and a 
BOF
that should be a good informal get-together. A bit further off is the

P2P
conference and XMLTech
Summit
, where there will also be some Jabber content. 


The @jabber.org service has been relatively stable recently. The DDoS
attacks have become less frequent, and the only downtime lately has
been
due to resource issues (sockets, cpu, memory). To help, we're working
on
getting either jpolld or dpsm in place to manage the sockets, and two
new
servers are on the way (thanks to the foundation) which are faster and
can
help divide the load and protect from runaway development code. The
transports
have been running well in general, but each have had their own
problems at
times, either due to issues on our end (runaways, bugs, or mem leaks)
or
on the other end (protocol changes and blocks [ICQ/AIM]). Also up for
testing
right now are two alpha services, pass.jabber.org and wcs.jabber.org. 


Some fun little growth statistics are that there have been 50,000
downloads
of the 1.4 server, and a few thousand of them are running publicly
that communicate
with jabber.org regularly. For the two popular servers jabber.org and
jabber.com,
there are over 125,000 registered users combined. The 
jdev@jabber.org
discussion list has surpassed 1000 subscribers, and the 
jabber.org
site has received over 1.5 million hits already this month. 


For anyone interested, let's have a little followup groupchat, join
myself
and others in the jdev conference room Friday (6/29/01) at 3pm CST
(2000 UTC) and we'll have an online "gossip" session. If it works
well, maybe
we'll just make that a weekly thing... which leads me to think that we
really
need a nice simple event calendar on jabber.org which can be updated
after
the event to link to logs, etc. 


As always, if you have any other juicy developer tidbits or gossip,
please
share and post as a comment :) 



http://jabber.org/?oid=1743

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