Bite-sized XMPP News #4

February 22, 2010

Here’s a collection of interesting XMPP-related updates from the microblogging world this week:

malditogeek: http://github.com/malditogeek/Pocho takes the stage! #weekendhack #xmpp #redis #ruby #

Pocho looks to be a neat little XMPP bot that stores hashtagged messages to XMPP group chat rooms. It also exposes these stored messages via a web interface as well. It sounds like an interesting bot!

kocio: #Jingle Nodes on Talkr.IM - simpler #XMPP #VoIP for the people http://www.process-one.net/en/blogs/article/jingle_nodes_on_talkr.im/ #osnews #

Thiago talked about Jingle Nodes at the XMPP summit, and they look interesting. I unfortunately missed his talk at the summit, but from what I understand, it brings Skype like peer-to-peer relaying to XMPP Jingle.

It will be interesting to see this develop further. Jingle is really starting to become part of the normal XMPP landscape. For example, at the summit, the N900s that Nokia kindly let us borrow all had support for Jingle calls.

tofu: ‘BOSH warming’ ejabberd module. cool stuff! !xmpp http://github.com/theoooo/mod_warm_bindings #

This is another implementation of the HTTP pre-binding technique. See mod_prebind and Mod_Http_Pre_Bind for two other example implementations.

There is not yet a standard for this technique, so each of these implementations does it differently. I think it’s time to write a XEP.

stpeter: it’s somewhat amusing that both the SIP-Communicator client and onsip PBX support XMPP these days… #

Amusing, but not surprising. After all, Cisco is a huge VoIP company, and they themselves purchased Jabber.com. The writing has been on the wall for a while for SIMPLE.

arc: #jabiru is a horribly broken !xmpp client for !android, is this really our only option? #

stevegibson: @arc: a quick google found the JabbIM !xmpp client for !android. #

thaluser: I found a GPLv2 !xmpp client for !android that works with #facebook called Yaxim. Unfortunately, it’s not in the official market. #

If you’re looking for an XMPP client for your favorite Android device, these three might be worth checking out.

danbri: experimenting with QR Codes as TV Test Cards as !XMPP service discovery hack - http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4359291206/ #

danbri: Scanning our TV with 3g iphone; it reads !xmpp jid from qrcode at 3 paces http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4360377558/in/photostream/ #

I met Dan Brickley at the summit, and he is doing some really interesting things with remote controlling media experiences that incorporates XMPP. I highly recommend paying attention to what he’s doing as I suspect you will be seeing more great stuff.

tdfischer: Dear tokbox: Thanks for using XMPP. You make reverse engineering easy. <3, tdfischer #

Thankfully, since XMPP is an open standard, reverse engineering is unnecessary. That’s the whole point!

mathemonkey: Wow! @elance uses #xmpp http-bind for “workroom” collaboration service… but it’s not accessible using ordinary XMPP client or GTalk :-( #

I wonder if this is because they use a custom authentication mechanism or if it’s just a case of not knowing the credentials to provide. In any case, it’s great to see XMPP in more places. I’m getting a little tired of seeing so many duplicate implementations of chat services.

ssethi: XMPP and One Social Web http://j.mp/cRykDk #

The One Social Web presentation at the summit was one of the most talked about, but unfortunately I showed up only at the end. I expect we’ll see some good things from this team.

h4nnes: Any recommendations for a xmpp client for iphone? im+ keeps crashing here :/ #

I use OneTeam for the iPhone, which has pretty good support for group chat as well as normal IM. The recently launched Meebo client also supports XMPP, but it does not support group chat.

vmlemon: Just configured XMPP-based FaceBook Chat in Pidgin, and pleased to see that it works as advertised. Now if only it supported federation… #

I think Facebook will get there. Server to server communication is one of the trickiest parts of XMPP, and it makes since that they would save this part for last. It took Google a while to get federation working as well.

dbanes: Anyone implementing XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP ? #

I just heard about such an implementation from a comment on my blog. The site is called BuddyMob, and apparently is an extended implemenation of XEP-0277. Hopefully the extensions will find their way into the specification as well.

jprieur: Archipel, xmpp based orchestrator for virtualization http://www.archipelproject.org/ #

This looks like an interesting start to virtualization infrastructure management.

drunknbass: I’m thinking you could totally power a game like words with friends with XMPP (openfire) #

I think that would be a great weekend project, and XMPP would be a perfect transport. With Strophe.js, HTML5 Canvas, and some JavaScript, this game could be made fairly easily.

xmppjingle: @pedrosorren Do you know Microsoft released an XMPP Gateway for its OCS closed services, due high customer demand? #theworldisopen #

One day, maybe we’ll see MSN and AIM get XMPP gateways just like Facebook. Sometimes it takes a decade or so for a project to fulfill its original goals.

xmppjingle: Facebook announced that their are building Mobile APIs, why not just expose its services over XMPP? The Chat works extremely well so far #

I think it makes a lot of sense to have a native XMPP interface to these APIs. For example, Gmail has shown that even though its mail interface doesn’t map cleanly to IMAP, there is enormous value in leveraging IMAP clients. Sure, it takes a little thought and planning, but the end result is well worth it.

rektide: what do #buzz, #xmpp, and to a degree #wave have in common? failure to abide the most basic/essential axiomatics of the #web; the uri. #

URIs are great and are used in XMPP where they make sense. I think most people would agree that e-mail style addresses are easier to use for humans than most URIs, though. XMPP is not a solution to all problems, and neither is HTTP.

That said, I’ve seen several efforts now to bridge some of the gap between HTTP and XMPP - sending stanzas through REST APIs, exposing chat rooms as web pages, etc.

gashcrumb: just a little bit closer to having a proper mock XMPP server to run unit tests against. nice! #

I hope this will be open sourced. There is unfortunately little in the way of specific XMPP testing tools. This is often brought up at the XMPP summits as something most of us want and need, but so far it has proved more complicated that it looked.