November 2nd, 2009
O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as interesting for developers in general, I released my article under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks to the good folks from O’Reilly for encouraging us to do this), which you can find here (or directly from my Git repository). The original excerpt from the book (including the index, list of biographies, and all the fancy artwork) is also available for download under the same license.
I of course encourage you to buy either the PDF or dead tree version of the book, as all the proceeds of the book go to charity.
Tags: Books, Jabber, Nothing But Nets, O’Reilly, Swift, Unit Testing, XMPP
Posted in Swift, Writing | 2 Comments »
September 4th, 2009
When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone’s The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it.
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Tags: Books, Casio, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Reverso, Reviews, Swatch, Switzerland, Watches
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
July 13th, 2009
Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an XMPP application, starting out with a simple bot implementation, but gradually extending the application into a full server component. For people who want to try this out for themselves, we’re releasing the source code of all code examples, including a simple echo bot, and different variants of the CheshiR microblogging platform XMPP interface.
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Tags: Books, Jabber, Python, SleekXMPP, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Programming, Writing | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2009
Because Openfire has been hogging too much of my limited el-tramo.be server resources lately, and because I don’t need a beast of an XMPP server for only 2 users, I decided to replace it by the lightweight Prosody. The migration went flawless, with the help of two tools: Sleek Migrate, and a Prosody XEP-0227 Importer.
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Tags: Jabber, Openfire, Prosody, Software, XMPP
Posted in Jabber, Software | 1 Comment »
June 27th, 2009
I added a DocBook XSL customization layer to my DocBook Kit that outputs an HTML/PHP version of the document that automatically integrates with a WordPress blog. The stylesheet also (optionally) adds a link to the downloadable PDF of the document. An example document integrating with this blog can be seen here.
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Tags: DocBook, DocBook Kit, DocBook XSL, PHP, WordPress
Posted in Writing | No Comments »
May 3rd, 2009
Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.
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Tags: Books, C++, Jabber, Nothing But Nets, O’Reilly, Swift, Unit Testing, XMPP
Posted in Swift, Writing | 1 Comment »
April 29th, 2009
When I started writing XMPP: The Definitive Guide, I switched from LaTeX to DocBook as my writing tool, mainly because DocBook was O’Reilly’s suggested format. After a few months of writing with DocBook, I started getting quite attached to the format: not only does it force you to separate presentation from content, the strict XML format allows you to easily write tools to transform and validate your document. For example, for the XMPP book, we had several short Python scripts that checked whether the stanzas used in the book were well-formed, whether all web URLs were valid, … Today, I use DocBook for practically all of my documents. Because getting a DocBook environment up requires putting together quite a few pieces from different places, I created a “DocBook kit” to be able to start writing a new DocBook project without much hassle.
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Tags: DocBook, DocBook Kit, Writing, XML
Posted in Writing | 7 Comments »
March 4th, 2009
The slides of the “XMPP 101” talk that Peter and I gave at FOSDEM are available below. This presentation gives a fast-paced introduction to XMPP, and is mostly based on “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”. If all goes well, we will be giving a more extended version of this talk as a tutorial at OSCON.
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Tags: FOSDEM, Jabber, Talks, Tutorials, XMPP
Posted in Jabber | 4 Comments »
March 3rd, 2009
I’m excited to announce a new player in the Jabber/XMPP game: Swift. Shortly after finishing the XMPP book, I started working on Swift, a pragmatic, cross-platform, user-friendly IM client. Together with Kevin Smith, we are building this project from the ground up, driving its development using agile methodologies. Underneath the IM client, we are working on an extensible and robust XMPP library, written in C++.
Until we launch the project and its website, you can subscribe to the Swift blog and identi.ca group to stay up to date with the latest news and developments around the project. Thanks to Dave Cridland for lending us his graphical capabilities and drawing us a pretty logo.
Tags: IM, Jabber, Swift, XMPP
Posted in Swift | 12 Comments »
February 8th, 2009
O’Reilly just sent us the cover for our upcoming XMPP Book, and it seems we got the world’s smallest ungulate: the lesser mouse-deer. I haven’t seen one in real life before, am not sure I ever want to, but still: great! Have a look below to see what the cover of the book will look like when it hits the stores in 2 months.
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Tags: Books, Jabber, O'Reilly, XMPP, XMPP-TDG
Posted in Jabber, Writing | 3 Comments »
