Planet Jabber

Peter Saint-Andre: Quick OAuth Notes

2008-07-23T15:09:19+00:00

I got an email from rabble overnight asking for some quick notes about our consensus on OAuth + XMPP from yesterday’s discussion at the XMPP Summit, so here goes…

Scenario: I want my Twhirl client to receive Kellan’s tune stream from last.fm via XMPP.

My Twhirl client asks last.fm for an OAuth token.
If last.fm considers me a friend of Kellan’s, it grants a token.

My Twhirl client sends an XMPP pubsub subscription request to last.fm, with appropriate OAuth bits:

<iq type='set'
    from='random-id@twhirl.org'
    to='last.fm'
    id='sub1'>
  <pubsub xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub'>
    <subscribe jid='random-id@twhirl.org'
               node='/music/Kellan+Elliott-McCrea'/>
    <oauth xmlns='urn:xmpp:oauth'>
      <oauth_consumer_key>0685bd9184jfhq22</oauth_consumer_key>
      <oauth_token>ad180jjd733klru7</oauth_token>
      <oauth_signature_method>PLAINTEXT+HMAC-SHA1>/oauth_signature_method>
      <oauth_signature>wOJIO9A2W5mFwDgiDvZbTSMK%2FPY%3D</oauth_signature>
    </oauth>
  </pubsub>
</iq>

Where oath_signature is:

sign(consumer key,consumer secret,token,token secret)

If the token and signature are verified, access is granted.
Whee, I receive real-time last.fm updates in my Twhirl client!

I’ll be updating XEP-0235 along these lines later today, but I might not get those revisions done before rabble’s talk at 11:30. :)

Peter Saint-Andre: Over the Summit

2008-07-23T09:10:47+00:00

Whew! The fifth XMPP Summit wrapped up earlier today (well, actually yesterday as I write this). It’s always difficult for me to tell if folks find these events worthwhile, because they are a bit of a whirlwind for me, as the person who’s “in charge” (hah!). But I’ve received positive feedback from everyone I’ve talked with — at least the core Jabber geeks and a few other folks I polled. In particular, I think we made good progress on two fronts:

Jingle. Rob McQueen of Collabora and Diana Cionoiu of Yate reached consensus on a number of issues, with input from me, Justin Uberti of the Google Talk team, and a few interested others. Rob has started posting emails to the jingle@xmpp.org discussion list, and we’ll be updating various specs and publishing one or two new ones in the near future.
OAuth. We’ve been talking for a while about ways to build hybrid HTTP+XMPP technologies, and use of OAuth is a big part of that. During a collaborative brainstorming session between Blaine Cook, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Evan Henshaw-Plath (rabble), Joe Hildebrand, and Ralph Meijer, we worked out some details for how we can send OAuth tokens and signatures over XMPP and therefore authorize access to resources on the Jabber network. I’ll be updating and renaming XEP-0235 real soon now (maybe even tomorrow) to reflect that consensus.

There are other actions as well, but I see those two as the big ones.

Anyway it’s past 2 AM here and my brain is fried from all my work on the Summit these past days and weeks, so I think I’ll sign off now and post more soon about all the interesting stuff happening in the wonderful world of XMPP.

Until then, Jabber on!

Kevin Smith: I’m not at the XMPP Summit

2008-07-21T20:16:29+00:00

I’m not at the XMPP Summit, sadly, but I’m being my usual nuisance self remotely, thanks to the summit MUC, and the live feed (thanks bear) at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/xmpp-summit–5. I’m sure someone who’s there can write a summary later, but at least this means those of us not fortunate enough to make it out there can enjoy [...]

Sylvain Hellegouarch: jlib preview - PyQt4 library for XMPP

2008-07-20T12:35:23+00:00

I've been recently working on a library called jlib that providing PyQt4 objects and widgets that can be integrated to a PyQt4 application. In other words jlib is not a new Jabber client but a toolbox to enjoy the benefit of XMPP. The XMPP work is performed by headstock, jlib only glues headstock to PyQt4 through the use of signals/slots.

jlib is not ready yet but here is a preview of a few widgets I've already started working on. Ultimately my main interests is in creating a decent toolbox of widgets centered towards XMPP PubSub.

Peter Saint-Andre: Approaching the Summit

2008-07-20T04:59:44+00:00

Sorry for the deathly quiet, I’ve been busy preparing for the XMPP Summit next week. See you in Portland!

Florian Jensen: Jabber.me coming soon!

2008-07-18T22:06:38+00:00

Preliminary Jabber.me logo

Evening guys (no girl is reading this blog anyway),

I thought I might just share my idea of Jabber.me here. As with all of my projects, the aim is to conquer the world (I am used to failure by now) and to offer the Jabber Community a fully equipped Jabber server. So let’s start off with the basics.

Jabber Server

We will deploy Tigase on our Dynamic Clustering Model. We have been using Tigase now for more than 6 months and are very happy with it. It supports our Dynamic Clustering, and allows us to scale up and down within minutes, so we can make sure you don’t experience any problems with the service.

Google Mail? We can do that!

Do you want a nice and short E-mail adress? Easily done! Your Jabber Account is actually also an E-mail account! So you can receive E-mails via Jabber, or your default E-mail client, using the same adress as your Jabber ID. You will be able to use your favourite E-mail client with IMAP support, so you can get your E-mails anywhere.

PubSub! I heard that somewhere!

PubSub has been in everyone’s mouth over the last few weeks. It’s that cool thing no-one actually knows what it does, but everyone has to have. It’s like these things with laser in the name. You hear laser, and every guy in the room wants to have it. So yeah, Jabber.me will have PubSub, and we actually have an idea what to do with it!

You’ll be able to publish your own blog on PubSub, so your friends can subscribe to your blog using their Jabber account and get notified the second you publish your post. And the best part is, we’ll provide easy plugins for your blog, so that you can get it up and running in a few seconds! That’s just cool!

Web & Widgets

The Web is a place where everyone has been to at least once in his life. I always wanted to have a small badge on my personal site, where you could see my Jabber Status, and start talking to me just by clicking on that badge. That’s what I call a widget, not a gadget (joke), and it should also work without Dashboard. Jabber.me will give you the possibility to create these easily, and add them to anything you want.

Free Phone Calls? Gimme, Gimme, gimme!

It’s true! Flosoft.biz is currently working on VoIP services, and those also include calling of fixed landlines and mobiles. I don’t know how we can do this yet, but we will find a way. The aim is to let the users call other users, and regular phones for free. Any ideas on how we could accomplish that via XMPP are welcome.

MicroBot - One Bot to rule them all!

You have Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca and probably some other MicroBlogs. It’s nearly impossible to keep them all up to date. This is where MicroBot comes in. Using MicroBot, you’ll be able to post to all your MicroBlogs at once.

Powering Development

With Jabber.me, we want to support the small developers, especially of server components. Developers will be able to upload and load their components to Jabber.me, and make them available to all. A few clicks, and your development code is running on our servers, allowing all the users to test it, and give immediately feedback. Cool ey?

Last but definetly not least: No Ads!

Ads are annoying. So I promise you, there will be no Ads EVER on Jabber.me! Not a single pixel of ads!

Well, that’s all the ideas I have for tonight; imagine what I can come up with in a little more time! So sit back, think about it, and maybe come up with even more cool features for Jabber.me!

Mikael Hallendal: Oringen 2008

2008-07-18T14:04:09+00:00

Going on vacation tomorrow for a week of orienteering in Sälen, Sweden. The terrain will vary from a more classic swedish orienteering for the first two stages and the go over to an alpine terrain with more open areas and higher altitude differences for the third and fourth stage. The last stage seems to be back to more classic terrain again with a mix of small hills and marshes.

In total the event (in my class) will be about 30km as the birds fly which should translate into something like 45-50km of terrain running over the course of five days. Hopefully I’ve exercised enough, I’ve tried to do 4-5 sessions per week over the last couple of weeks and luckily Guadec had little impact on the overall fitness as this week felt really good.

Process One: ProcessOne at XMPP summit

2008-07-18T08:50:23+00:00

ProcessOne will be at the XMPP summit from 20th to 22th of july 2008.

We are eager to meet XMPP servers and clients developers, but also our users around Portland.

If you would like us to meet and will not be at the XMPP summit itself, please drop me a mail

Process One: Usage estimation of public XMPP servers per domain

2008-07-18T08:40:45+00:00

Based on data gathered by our IMtrends search engine, here is our very first "market shares" estimation on XMPP servers, for domains known by IMtrends.

Please, first note that study relies on a panel of 7292 XMPP domains as discovered by the IMtrends engine. This should be still only a partial analysis of the existing XMPP servers: we cannot take into account totally private servers. However, we have received feedback that a lot of the known XMPP public deployments are already gathered in the IMtrends database. You can check by yourself on our search engine and add more public servers in the database that we could be missing: See IMtrends.

Please, also note that those statistics do not take into account the size of the domains (the number of total users and simultaneous users peak).

Now, let's get to the data. Here is a breakdown on server usage per type on the 18 july 2008:

Software Family	Market Share
ejabberd	37.0%
jabberd14	22.4%
openfire	18.4%
jabberd2	11.3%
Google XMPP	6.2%
wpjabber	0.9%
XCP	0.2%
djabberd	0.1%
SoapBox	0.1%
psyc	0.1%
Isode M-Link	0.1%
tigase	0.1%
timp	0.1%
JCS	0.0%
MOO-XMPP	0.0%
Unknown*	3.0%

We will publish more statistics analysis in the coming months, so stay tuned.

Kevin Smith: Thanks, Psi

2008-07-17T21:09:05+00:00

I’ve been meaning to make this post for an age… A decent number of people thank the Psi project, and that’s great; I get thanked more than most, I think, because I’m the one who gets to make the release announcements, and it looks like I do all the work because of this. These days, I [...]

Coccinella: SVG Graphics

2008-07-17T13:31:39+00:00

Just released is my tkpath package version 0.3.0 which for the first time brings a new canvas widget to Tcl/Tk which conforms to a more "modern" 2D drawing model found in SVG.

My motiviation for producing close to 43 thousand lines of C code for just this widget is because it is necessary for adding SVG graphics to the whiteboard in Coccinella. It doesn't claim to be a full featured SVG viewer. In fact, there is no support for translating svg <-> tkpath yet, but since I have carefully designed the widget with SVG in mind, it shouldn't be too difficult to write such script code. SVG is really big and I don't claim every part is supported. For instance, clipping is yet unsupported. Remember, it is still version 0.3.0.

For the curious you can visit the SourceForge page where some screenshots can be found and the complete sources can be checked out. Before I have written a svg2tkp importer I don't have much fancy graphics to show.

Process One: Boost corporate productivity with instant messaging

2008-07-16T17:48:16+00:00

Instant messaging has been perceived as a productivity killer tool for a long time. A recent study shows that it is not the case and can actually reduce workplace interruption.

Science Daily covers a new study from Ohio State University and University of California. The study suggests that employers seeking to decrease interruptions may want to have their workers use instant messaging software.

Kelly Garret, co-author of the study says: “We found that the effect of instant messaging is actually positive. People who used instant messaging reported that they felt they were being interrupted less frequently.”

Unlike phone, email and face-to-face meeting in your co-worker office, instant messaging provides presence and status indications that proves very useful to choose the best time to interrupt them. Garret says: “We find that employees are quite strategic in their use of instant messaging. They are using it to check in with their colleagues to find out if they’re busy before interrupting them in a more intrusive way,”

This is something we have seen from the field at ProcessOne when developing our corporate instant messaging client OneTeam. We decided that productivity was the main driver for instant messaging adoption in the workplace. We decided to focus our effort on special unique productivity features that allow users to have a better control on their status through different presence indication for different groups of contact at the same time. Depending on what you are doing you can be available for a group of co-workers but busy for others. A single status presence indicator is too limiting to correctly reflect user availability. With OneTeam client, you can even control from which contacts you want to receive messages immediately and have the other messages be delayed until you switch back to a more open work situation.

Instant Messaging deployments in the enterprise can become a powerful new tool to boost your teams productivity in the corporate world.

Reference article: Ohio State University. "Instant Messaging Proves Useful In Reducing Workplace Interruption." ScienceDaily 4 June 2008. 5 June 2008 .

Mikael Hallendal: Back from Guadec

2008-07-15T23:18:45+00:00

Somewhat back to normal routines after a week in beautiful Istanbul. As people reading Planet GNOME have seen from others, it was a great Guadec this year.

I found the schedule to be a bit uninspiring but that left more time for discussions and hacking. Among the sessions I went to I really enjoyed going to Alp’s session about Webkit and Blizzards on Mozilla. Some really interesting things coming from these projects.

Kris did a great job wrapping up the current state in GTK+ during his now traditional ‘GTK+ State of the Union’ talk and happy to see that the discussion around future GTK+ is getting started throughout the community. I spent a lot of time this year talking and listening to peoples feedback on the proposed plans. Realized that some things have been a bit left out from the discussions after the hackfest and that we need to do a better job at communicating what we plan to work on besides the cleanups and enabling of future development.

Finally a warm welcome to Stormy as executive director of the GNOME Foundation Board.

Jabber Filaments Blog: Presence During Times of Crisis

2008-07-15T22:42:17+00:00

Social computing technologies are changing the way people communicate during emergencies. In research funded by the National Science Foundation, in the exciting new field of Crisis Informatics, Dr. Leysia Palen of the University of Colorado and her colleagues are investigating the social, technical and informational aspects of crises and disasters.

For any user of instant messaging and other presence-enabled social applications, it is second nature to look at the presence indicators in the application to see who is online and available. This, the most basic use of presence information, provides considerable value, even without any messages being sent. Presence has particular value during emergencies, when it is necessary to determine the status of many people but there is no time to contact them all on an individual basis.

In discussion of student behavior during the shooting crisis at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, Palen, et al. write:

Instant messaging, by virtue of showing who is on-line and active, allows users to have co-temporal awareness of the presence of others. In the case of VT, if someone’s IM “buddy” indicator was active, that person had to be on-line and therefore not injured.

It will always be challenging to determine precisely what is happening, who is affected and what needs to be done during rapidly unfolding crises. Information disseminated within online social communities has proven to be useful in getting more accurate real-time understanding of emergency situations. Because presence is a push technology, there is no need to poll client applications to receive near real-time presence updates - they are sent automatically. This automation makes presence information particularly valuable when disaster strikes, because presence and presence state changes will still be sent, even if people are unable to send more detailed messages.

The value of presence is further enhanced by the addition of presence attributes such as activities, mood, location, etc. Crisis response systems designed around these rich presence attributes provide a high level of real-time situational awareness and can be used along with other communications modalities. For example, the CAPWIN emergency response system uses role/skill and locational presence attributes to identify the closest responders with the appropriate skills to best respond to a particular emergency. The CAPWIN system also uses multi-user chat sessions for highly efficient coordination between all people involved in an emergency response.

Presence-enabled applications already play significant role in during emergencies and are poised to have a larger role in the future.

Paweł Wiejacha: [gsoc] Psi themable chat dialogs - Release 3

2008-07-15T11:50:59+00:00

Have you ever heard of Pareto's principle? It's 80/20 rule that states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. I think it also applies to programming: 20% of code covers 80% of functionality and the rest (80 percent) of code covers 20% functionality.

Now it's time to do the weekly report.

Changes since last release:

PlainTextChatView with most of old Psi ChatView functionality
improvements in HTMLChatEdit, but you still cannot insert images (it's 20% of functionality that takes 80% of time :])
simple 'Themes' options tab (you cannot change chat theme after the windows is created)
HTML and PlainText ChatViews are (kind of) integrated with Psi (see screenshot below)

Plans for next release:

Have consecutive messages working.
Emoticons in HTMLChatView
Proper ChatInfo ('Kot Behemot' while i'm talking with Kev)
Have the dialog resizing work.
Have theme changing work.
Theme caching through a ThemeManager.

Screenshot:

Dave Cridland: An XMPP Primer

2008-07-15T10:21:11+00:00

@edd, as I like to call him, suggested that XMPP wasn’t terribly easy to get into, as it lacks a kind of introduction for would-be developers - there’s a steep learning curve to get through. I’m not convinced, in part because I wrote a client good enough to have a conversation over within 24 hours, but it’s fair to say that I couldn’t have written much more, and besides, I read specifications quite a bit anyway.

So these posts are, essentially, a quick primer - they describe the protocol in high-level terms, and the aim is that when you (yes, you) read the RFCs and XEPs, it won’t be quite so scary. There will be simplifications - and I’ll try to point those out when I make them - and there will be errors - because I’m not infallible - but hopefully you’ll end up with some familiarity when you read the specifications.

Ignite Realtime Blog: Whack and SparkWeb have graduated. Help me congratulate them!

2008-07-14T23:10:46+00:00

Whack 1.0 has been released. Whack is our Open Source XMPP (Jabber) component library for XMPP components. External components are processes that run outside of the Openfire's process but can connect to the server to register new XMPP service. Whack is an implementation of XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol.

Unlike the other igniterealtime products, Whack followed a different evolution path. We started coding Whack around November 2004 and after a few months it was operational. Openfire and Whack share the same component's API so around 2005 we were able to run Fastpath as an internal component (i.e. running in the Openfire's process) or just move it as an external component using Whack. It was impressive seeing the same code running as internal and external. Since then Whack continued to evolve but always at a very slow pace. Whack was always stable in each step but it was just not ready for prime time. We wanted to keep adding more things to it to reach a 1.0 release. Since our collaboration software Clearspace uses Whack to integrate with Openfire we needed to push the boundaries of Whack once again and I'm happy to say that we now reached the 1.0 release. And that is why we decided to make a public release in 2008 after 4 years of continuous but slow growth.

A few months ago we also released a new product called SparkWeb. SparkWeb is our Open Source web-based IM client. SparkWeb is based on XIFF just like Spark is based on Smack. Today we updated the products page to list SparkWeb as an official product. Welcome SparkWeb! The family has grown a little bit now.

You can get Whack from here. Questions could be posted to the Whack forum.

SparkWeb can be downloaded from here. If you want to build from the source code you can read the Getting and Building SparkWeb document.

Tomas Karasek: Midterm update

2008-07-14T00:33:33+00:00

After some structure changes in Gajim XMPP code I finally got to implementing HTTP connections handling and now my branch can be used with BOSH Connection Managers in ejabberd 2.0.1 and Openfire 3.5.2. You can find it in Gajim svn: svn co svn://svn.gajim.org/gajim/branches/bosh_support@9924 In order to connect over http bindings you need to create proxy with type "BOSH" in Proxy Managing dialog

Safa Sofuoğlu: Roadmap Revised

2008-07-11T18:49:14+00:00

After an investigation about the migration to Apache MINA, I have found that MINA could be insufficent to meet our needs. We needed at least a lightweight HTTP engine, and a servlet launcher engine, because Openfire uses servlets to handle BOSH requests. During my search, I came upon grizzly, which could be a good alternative for us. It has an HTTP engine and a servlet launcher engine built in. However, we needed to make scalability test to be sure about its performance, and these tests could take some time. That's why I deferred working on Openfire's BOSH connection manager.

By the way, my mentor Gaston offered me to do the BOSH update also on the client side. So, I will be working on SparkWeb's BOSH implementation from now on.

Paweł Wiejacha: Release 2 and Mid-term Evaluations

2008-07-10T20:20:54+00:00

It's mid-term evaluations week. Here's my report.

Status:

Currently there is:

standalone HTMLChatView. Changes since the last release:

clearing messages
changing themes doesn't clear view
Adium 1.0 keywords
clean-up/refactorings
auto-scrolling

80% of HTMLChatEdit (an XHTML-IM message WYSIWYG composer)
MessageValidator that removes unwanted tags, attributes and CSS properties from incoming XHTML-IM messages
unit tests for HTMLChatView, MessageValidator, and CSS validator
compatibility with Adium and Kopete themes (excluding %textBackground{X}% keyword, and client.zoomImage())

Next release

HTMLChatEdit:

inserting images and hyperlinks
QTextDocument -> XHTML-IM message converter (<img> and <a> tags)

PlainTextChatView - old Psi chat view with new API
PlainTextChatView itegration with Psi (at some level)

Weekly screenshot

Process One: Yahoo! in favor of open instant messaging standard XMPP

2008-07-08T17:00:04+00:00

After its experiments on XMPP, Yahoo! now admits that instant messaging interoperability is needed and that XMPP is the most likely protocol to support federation of instant messaging platforms.

Yahoo's new head of communications products Scott Dietzen recently gave an interview to CNET. Scott comes from Zimbra, a communication company that use XMPP in its communication. Now that Zimbra has been acquired by Yahoo!, the believe of XMPP as the best candidate for instant messaging protocol has spread.

As reported by CNET, Dietzen said in an interview: "I believe XMPP is the right platform through which to deliver interoperability with at least some of our partners."

When asked about SIP / SIMPLE protocol, he adds: "There are two competing potential standards, XMPP and...SIP. If I were betting, I'd bet on XMPP emerging as the likely framework for adoption."

This interview confirms that things are moving in the XMPP direction at Yahoo!, as previously reported.

You can get more details on CNET article: Yahoo's encouraging words for IM standards

Coccinella: Sprichst du Deutsch? ¿Hablas español?

2008-07-07T23:38:19+00:00

Screencasts are fun, especially when they feature Coccinella! ;-) That's why we like to share 2 screencast reviews: a German spoken one first, and secondly a Spanish one.

Portalzine.tv machte einen fantastischen Screencast von Coccinella:

Genbeta hizo un magnifico screencast de Coccinella:

Do you know other screencast reviews of Coccinella? Do you plan to create a similar screencast review in your language? Tell us!

Adam Nemeth: Active resource representations - aka OEmbed

2008-07-07T19:46:00+00:00

(Note: this isn't a jabber-only posts, although one of the earliest implementations is in Google Talk Gadget, and the jabber community could benefit from this in general)

PHP-OEmbed project page

Remember when the newly introduced Google Talk Gadget displayed Youtube videos instead of showing their links? That's what I call "active resource representation", because it represents the given video more [inter]actively than the pure link - which is hardly showing anything in the case of youtube.

I believe that a resource usually can be equally represented in a small place: there's no need to load a full page to view a youtube video or a flickr photo, but there isn't need for it to look at a person's social network profile, to accept/reject a calendar invitation, etc - and all of these have URLs nowadays. These technologies could be used in e-mail systems, forums, and chat clients.

What OEmbed does, is that it tries to provide metadata about a certain resource found at the given URL. That is: you send the link of a flickr photo, and you get an XML or JSON-formatted structure back. While it can be argued, that these could be / should be / in an ideal world, would be solved by HTTP headers, this is not the case, and this solution isn't as bad.

I tried to do a server-side PHP framework, which talks the OEmbed protocol for clients to consume, however, it makes you be able to create non-oembed compatible wrappers too (the perfect example is youtube, of course). This could be used in a web-client, given that it talks back javascript to you.

Currently, it can handle (proxy) any OEmbed provider (given that you enter their respective address into the providers.xml file), and it has a Youtube provider, which uses some not-so-official part of the "official YouTube Data API". New providers can be added by looking at the provider API - oh, and there's no error handling yet, so you could understand the code :)

Note: I extended OEmbed protocol a bit, namely:

There could be a description field for every OEmbed-entity (handy for tooltips)

There could be a duration part (in seconds) for video embeds

The original resource URL could be in the data response

Oh, and Flickr: please add thumbnails! Thanks :)

Aleksey Palazchenko: Sneak-preview for GUI

2008-07-07T13:33:15+00:00

Too much time have passed since my last post. Due to exams PITA (I had 5 of them at June) and health problems I was unable to spent much time for my project. This should be changed.

Process One: IDC: Instant messaging to overtake email in business

2008-07-07T13:30:05+00:00

According to IDC, instant messaging is set to overtake email as the preferred form of business communication by the second half of 2010.

The research shows that what they call the Hyper-connected have already adopted instant messaging as their primary channel for communication and will be driving instant messaging in the corporate world to the mass effect.

This trend will place instant messaging at the heart of the enterprise communication channels. You can thus expect the focus of the leading instant messaging platform to become security, compliance, robustness and ability to federate with the external world.

A good coverage of IDC research is available from Computerworld UK: IM to overtake email in business claims IDC.