Ted Leung on the air : XMPP everywhere

Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...

Mon, 16 Aug 2004

Last week, Lisa Dusseault introduced me to Joe Hildebrand, a long time XMPP hacker. The three of us had a long discussion about XMPP related stuff. I looked at Jabber a while ago, before it became XMPP, and I've always been interested in it. I've also always been held back by the fact that very few people that I know are on Jabber.

One thing that I asked about was the rumor that Apple will be incorporating Jabber into Tiger. This has been well publicized on the Tiger Server side, but left a mystery on the Jabber client side. Joe didn't have a lot of new information, but I did learn that Apple is already using a slightly extended version of XMPP (to deal with Rendezvous) for the iChat Rendezvous mode. Getting iChat to work seamlessly with Jabber would be a good thing, since Apple has found the killer app to lock me in to iChat -- namely iChat AV. The ability to do this over Jabber would be a big step towards IM freedom.

We talked about the use of XMPP for machine-machine notification and the ability of Jabber clients to implement selective presence (only being visible to certain people during work or off-work hours, for example). It looks like there are lots of cool things that you could do if there were a really good Jabber infrastructure (clients and servers) and a decent number of Jabber users.

It turns out that earlier in the week Peter Saint-Andre wrote a pair of blog posts, as a rallying call in order to increase Jabber adoption. His proposal involves Python servers and clients, and possibly use of Twisted in order to get the job done. I hope that something will come of this -- I'd sure like to have great XMPP libraries for Python.

[23:31] | [computers/open_source] | # | TB | F | G | 5 Comments |

I was under the impression that iChat originally was a Jabber client but it was changed to be an AIM client when Apple signed a deal with AOL. So making it work for Jabber doesn't seem like it would be too hard... More speculation and heresay here:

http://tim.geekheim.de/archive/000659.html
Posted by Barnaby James at Tue Aug 17 06:36:15 2004

There is pyxmppp and here is the app that uses it with success
Posted by Nikos Kouremenos at Tue Aug 17 07:32:54 2004

There's not too many good Python XMPP libraries. While PyXMPP looks good at first glance, it can hardly be considered "multiplatform" -- it relies heavily on libxml2 and uses custom C extension, which makes building it on Windows a real PITA. I think Peter Saint-Andre had other understanding of "multiplatform" when he wrote his blog entries.

On the other hand, you can wait until XmppPy matures (it's not a fast process, though) and give it a try. This library uses only expat, so it may be easier to deploy on 95% of machines currently in use. Unfortunately, in current state (version 0.1) it is not usable.
Posted by Jarek Zgoda at Wed Aug 18 00:45:28 2004

Actually, the XMPP support in Twisted is currently pretty good, and is the basis for the rewrites of both the MSN and ICQ XMPP transports.

http://msn-transport.jabberstudio.org/
Posted by Phil Wilson at Wed Dec 1 12:28:45 2004

Is selective presence notifications (only being visible to certain people during work or off-work hours, for example) a part of the XMPP specification?

Thanks,
-Srinath.
Posted by Srinath at Tue Sep 13 10:03:35 2005

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments for this blog:

Add a comment here:

You can use some HTML tags in the comment text:
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are: <a href>, , , , <blockquote>,  , , <code>, <pre>, <cite>,  and .

You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
 => _emphasized text_
 => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk

<	August 2004					>
Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31