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.
Posts Tagged ‘XMPP’
Rough cuts of XMPP book now available
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008Trying out Git
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, …). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository).
We’re writing an XMPP book
Thursday, August 21st, 2008I’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!
Going Agile with Google Summer of Code
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Although Psi has had a fair number of succesful Google Summer of Code projects so far, we have experienced some failures as well: the summer before last, 3 out of 6 projects didn’t make the final deadline. A project’s failure was typically due to not having anything really usable at the end of the summer, regardless of the good work that was done during the past months. To reduce the risk of such surprises, I decided to take an Agile Development approach for this year’s ‘Roster improvement’ project.
Mimicking Jaiku with Psi
Friday, May 2nd, 2008The day before yesterday, Peter Saint-Andre sent out a couple of Jaiku invites to all Jabber Google Summer of Code students and their mentors, including me. Never having looked at microblogging before, I toyed around with it a bit, and it quickly reminded me that I still had something on my Psi wish-list for a while now: a flat, live log of all Jabber events in your network. Since I had a long weekend, I quickly coded up a prototype, and hooked it into Psi.
Improving Psi’s roster
Thursday, May 1st, 2008For a while now, Psi users have been requesting several changes and additions to the roster (or `contact list‘). These requests include grouping contacts into meta-contacts, nested roster groups, and displaying user avatars in the roster. We have been postponing all these changes to the roster as much as possible, because none of us wanted to touch the roster code, for reasons I’ll explain below. This year, Psi is fortunate enough to have Adam Czachorowski (aka Gislan), a student from the Google Summer of Code, to work on roster improvements.
Introducing Greem
Sunday, October 14th, 2007After 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.
Testing Psi
Monday, October 1st, 2007While 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.
Qtopia Greenphone Grant
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007A 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.
Customizable XEP-0076 implementation
Sunday, April 1st, 2007It 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.
