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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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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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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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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After a few weeks of heavy labour and long nights, Peter, Kevin, and I just submitted the final revision of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide” to the folks at O’Reilly. All the feedback from our (thorough) reviewers has been processed, we added quite a few extra bits and clarifications (58 pages to be exact), polished the whole thing up, and went through the resulting manuscript with a fine toothed comb. We hope the people who will read this book will be as satisfied with the end result as we are. If all goes according to plan, the book should roll out of the presses in about 2 months. In the mean time, you can expect an update to the on-line rough cut version of the book in the next couple of days.

While Kevin, Peter, and I are working very hard to finish the first draft of our upcoming book ‘XMPP: The Definitive Guide’, O’Reilly has recently released early versions of most of the chapters of the book as Rough Cuts. People interested in learning about XMPP today can now get a preliminary version of the book, and get updates as the book progresses.

I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O'Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a general overview of XMPP, its workings, and its possibilities. On the other hand,  software engineers who want to integrate XMPP into their products will get a guide to implementing different use cases of XMPP through a series of different developer stories. The book is expected to be available in 2009, so start making some room on your bookshelf!

After a short hiatus, I finally resumed work on my new Jabber/XMPP client project, which I christened `Greem'. The main goal of the project is to create a mobile Jabber/XMPP client for the Qtopia platform. The nice thing about Qtopia is that its target audience keeps on expanding: besides running on the GreenPhone (of which Trolltech was kind enough to provide me with one), Qtopia has recently been ported to the Neo 1973 (OpenMoko), and even Windows CE and Windows Mobile. In this post, I briefly describe what the expectations and the goals are for Greem, and how Psi fits into the picture.

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While the last bugs are being squeezed out of Psi 0.11’s release candidates, work on 0.12 has already begun. One thing I’m excited about as a developer is the fact that we’re making the Psi codebase `testable', which has some nice consequences.

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A month or 2 ago, I applied for the Qtopia Greenphone Innovation Grant Program, an initiative from TrollTech to promote the development of applications for their Linux-based Qtopia Greenphone. I probably won’t surprise anyone by saying that I sent in a proposal about writing a good, cross-platform, mobile Jabber/XMPP client. Anyway, I was very excited to receive a mail from TrollTech yesterday, stating that my proposal was accepted by their review panel! As an applicant, I will be receiving a shiny new Greenphone, together with a Qtopia SDK to develop against. Deadline for submitting my application: October 31st. Let the coding begin.

It is time for us to be honest: the reason Psi has not had a release in the past year and a half is because we have secretly been working on one of the most controversial and least implemented features in the Jabber world: XEP-0076 (Malicious Stanzas). We have allocated two full-time developers for achieving this: Machekku has done the groundbreaking work, implementing the main processing loop, statistic gathering, and user interfaces for this type of stanzas, whereas I have been concentrating mostly on backend issues. Although our work is still in a highly experimental stage, we decided to release the full source code in order to get useful feedback from the community. Besides a Psi implementation, we also provide an Openfire server-side implementation for malicious stanza tagging as an extension of the content filter, targeted at fixing non-XEP-0076-compliant behavior of entities.

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We recently made Psi’s dialogs related to account creation, registration, and modification a bit easier to use. The account registration process is now a wizard-like dialog, where a user first needs to select a server (from a centralized on-line list), and then needs to provide the information requested by the server (according to XEP-0077: In-Band Registration). We have also introduced new default settings that should avoid the need to tweak any account settings when adding an existing account. This means that you should be able to log into any XMPP server (including Google Talk) just by entering your JID and password. Some more details and screenshots below.

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As Google released a new version of libjingle last friday, I decided to experiment with their file transfer implementation in Psi this weekend. I added some code that allows someone to accept files sent by Google Talk, and tested it with a few Google Talk contacts, with a perfect success rate (so far). For the brave who wish to experiment with this, see the instructions below. Note that this code is unofficial, untested, only uses a very rudimentary UI (there is no integration with the existing file transfers), still suffers from at least two bugs (on Mac OS X: one that segfaults when receiving images, and one where CPU skyrockets to 100% after a while, which we had with older libjingles as well), and has no support from the Psi developers whatsoever. Comments should therefore go directly to me.

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Kev and I will be attending FOSDEM on February 24th and 25th, and we’ll be joining other XMPP developers at the XMPP Interop Event and DevCon the day after. So, if you want to meet up, or have some outstanding protocol issues with Psi, now is a good time to tell us :)

As many of you know, Psi has been using Darcs for version controlling since the development of 0.10. However, although Darcs works on most platforms, some people have been experiencing problems with getting Darcs to work for them. Because of this, and some other inconveniences (not being able to checkout subdirectories of the development tree, long checkout times, the lack of a scalable web-interface, …), we have decided to create a Subversion mirror our development repository (using Tailor).

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After gathering dust for a few months in some deep and dark corner of my hard disk, my vCard-based Extended Presence plugin for Openfire is now publicly available here.

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While waiting for Qt to stabilize, we’re keeping on adding new features to Psi. Support for JEP-138 (Stream Compression) has just hit the mainline development branch, allowing traffic to be compressed using zlib. Stream compression is supported by the latest versions of Wildfire and ejabberd.

We reported earlier about our work on finally bringing Psi up to speed with the XMPP standard. Because of necessary changes in QCA2, this could only be tested through the nightly Mac OS X and Windows builds we provide. Today, we merged a patched version of QCA2 into the Psi mainline development branch, making it possible for everyone to compile Psi with XMPP1 support (enabled by default).

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Jason Kim, who previously designed the Psi logos and the Stellar iconset, has drawn a new Stellar icon. Combining his shiny icon with the overlays from the Crystal iconset resulted in the new Stellar3 iconset, which you can see in action below. The new iconset, which is still subject to small changes, has been added to the Psi mainline development branch.

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This weekend, mblsha and I had a coding sprint to make Psi XMPP-compatible, hoping to be in time for the XMPP interop event. Although we didn’t make it physically to the event, we still managed to get Psi compliant.

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I have to confess, i’m kind of a fan of very simple Jabber clients that do not overwhelm you with menuitems, toolbars, and options. This is why i like clients such as Google Talk and iChat so much. I always hoped Psi could one day be such a simple client, but the fact is that we have a very broad userbase, of which many are power-users that do not want to give up any option or feature whatsoever. I never really understood why people needed to send plain messages (instead of chats) in IM, why there is such a thing as ‘Extended Away’ and ‘Free for chat’ in a chat system where you have status messages, why someone would want to hide contacts that are ‘Away’, and the list goes on. However, we’ve had many discussions about this before, and the conclusion is always that someone on this planet wants this, so we never touched these (IMO) silly features. Until now …

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The Psi feature frenzy continues! With my PhD draft text delivered last week, I finally had some more time over the weekend to implement some neat stuff. And not just any stuff: after many years of being blamed for not keeping up with the times, we finally have support for JEP-0045 (Multi User Chat) in our mainline development branch. Sure, maybe some small aestetic modifications can still be done here and there, but all of the functionality should be there. This means you don’t have any excuse whatsoever to be anti-social anymore, so start joining all the fun chatrooms such as psi@conference.jabber.ru.

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As some of you probably know, the upcoming 0.11 version of Psi will have remote controlling capabilities. For those of you for which this is new information, or for people that have a hard time imagining what this feature exactly does, I created a screencast (requires QuickTime) showcasing the current list of available commands (and more).

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As Kev announced earlier today, we took the dust of our Libjingle branch of Psi, and merged it into the mainline development branch (mainly to ease code management). It is not unusual to discover things when you go through stuff you haven’t seen in a while, and this time was no different: we found out, much to our surprise, that we actually had a working support for Libjingle on Mac OS X all this time! Support for OS X was written several months ago, by defining a new sound card type in mediastreamer (a third-party framework included in libjingle), making use of the cross-platform PortAudio API to do interaction with the audio hardware. We never tested it, so we assumed it didn’t work. Fortunately, a quick test proved that wrong ! So now we are down to one unsupported platform: Windows. Because PortAudio is cross-platform, it should in theory work on other platforms as well, including Windows. However, we have not had the time to test this theory, so it might require some more work. But I’m sure Kev will keep us posted on that !

Since the beta2 release of Psi a few days ago, some new stuff has hit our development branch. First of all, Psi now has support for avatars. These can be set and displayed using the (current version of the) PEP-based JEP-84 (User Avatar), and there is read-only support of the historical JEP-153 (vCard-based Avatars), supported by such clients as Google Talk, iChat, and the Py* transports. Secondly, the remote controlling interface of Psi has been extended with forwarding of unread messages (thanks to Norman Rasmussen). And finally, events coming from unlisted contacts (such as subscriptions or messages) now include the nickname of the contact through JEP-172 (User Nickname). A consequence of this is that mass-adds from gateways will go a lot smoother. And now we’re really stopping this feature frenzy, we promise !

There has been a slight shift in the roadmap of Psi. While the only goal of 0.11 was to port it to Qt4 (do i hear a booooring somewhere?), we decided to make 0.11 also fully XMPP-compliant. We therefore merged the current ‘next generation’ branch (which amongst others supports privacy lists) with the mainline development branch. A consequence of this is that other features were pulled into mainline as well (yay!), so it’s not unacceptable to start looking forward to the next release.

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A few weeks ago, Tom Germeau from MozChat brought to my attention that recent clients such as Google Talk, Gajim, Pandion (and of course MozChat) are all using JEP-0085 (Chat State Notifications) for doing `Contact is typing …‘ notifications. There have been many discussions in the past on whether or not to prefer this JEP over the old JEP-0022 (Message Events), which most of the other clients out there implement. This is why Psi didn’t implement chat sates yet. However, we recently decided to put this (cleaner, standards track) JEP into our mainline development version after all.

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Magnus Henoch announced a few days ago that he was working on an ejabberd implementation for JEP-163 (Personal Eventing Protocol), the protocol formerly known as SPPS. I found a bit of spare time today to finish the real (as opposed to pseudo-) PEP implementation in Psi, while Magnus fixed some things on the server side. The implementation isn’t available publically yet (since no server supports it anyway), but interested server developers are of course always welcome to ask for a snapshot.

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We’re currently working on putting JEP-0163: Simplified Personal Publish-Subscribe into Psi. A result of this work, together with an implementation of User Tune as our use case, can be seen in action here.

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TuneController is a modular plugin-based Qt interface for talking to media players such as iTunes, XMMS, and WinAmp. The provided functionality is currently limited to notifying of player state and song changes, but other features (such as remote controlling, queueing, …) will be added in the future.

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Support for JEP-115 (Entity Capabilities) has just hit the Psi mainline development branch. This doesn’t mean much to the user, except that it can display the client version of contacts without the burst of client-version queries each time you connect. However, there is still the overhead of the extra tag in every presence packet sent and received, but stream compression (either through TLS or using JEP-138) should take care of this in the future. JEP-115 also describes a server optimization to reduce traffic, but as far as we know, no server implements this. We hope that if more clients start supporting entity capabilities, the servers will follow as well.

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Good news to start the year: the new Psi Qt4 branch has been made public as a new year gift. Yes, another branch of Psi to keep track of, and I have a feeling that this won’t be the last one either ;). For those interested, I wrote something together about the new soon-to-be-mainline-development branch.

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I finally got around to doing some more privacy list work for Psi. After porting what i had to our soon-to-be-released Qt4 branch, i even managed to add some more functionality. Basically, what I have so far can be seen here (minus the ‘Add’ button in the rules list).

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