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The only thing I see missing is an MX-like DNS record for IM servers.

They exist.

The only thing I see missing is an MX-like DNS record for IM servers.

We also use the Wilefire http://www.jivesoftware.org/wildfire/ server and spark.

I do have one problem with spark though, its fairly slow to load on our machines (I work as IT at a high school 400mhz - 800mhz is our average machine speeds...)

I just tried teh Exodus client from http://exodus.jabberstudio.org/ and i have to say im really likeing it just for the load times.

btw even here on my home machine spark seems slow :/ (athlon 64x2 3800+ 2gb ram ... )

Jabber along with Exodus works wonders. When I worked at a small/mid sized (200 employees) business I configured this across the board along via VPN. It was secure, fast, stable and as good as any IM client and server I've come across. I configure employees into groups in accordance with their office (e.g. NY, Miami, Mass, etc.). Workers were able to transfer files when necessary, vent gripes without worrying about snooping, etc.

Use http://jsjac.jabberstudio.org/ to build your own web-based jabber client or use derived work like JWChat or MUCkl.

http://allforces.com/2005/05/06/ichat-to-msn-throu gh-jabber/

An article on how to set up iChat to interoperate with MSN and Yahoo Messenger, using a Jabber server as a gateway. Mac-centric, obviously, but it gives an overview of what you'd need to do. The MSN-Jabber translation is all done by the server -- there's nothing really interesting going on at the client end. I think the MSN stuff is handled by this piece of software.

At one point I found a site which listed Jabber servers and showed what protocol-gatways they had running, but I can't find that list anymore. The examples used on the link above are in the Czech Republic, kind of a long haul for a US-originated and -bound packet.

Check out XUL. It is good enough to write a browser, Jabber client, or complete bookshop.

Check out some of the UI functionality here.

Jeti (http://jeti.jabberstudio.org/) is a java based jabber client, you can click the link in the top left corner of that page to launch it in your browser.

It's not too bad.

There's actually a few public Jabber services already that have installed Jabber's MSN transport. If Google engineers are as good as they seem, they'll have no trouble at all to let you talk to your MSN friends.

Do not IM him (and hey, what IT department hasn't locked IM along with everything else down anyhow).

I'm running a jabberd2 server in my company with lots of users with no problems at all. It is free, stable and has a plethora of clients for all major platforms.

Is there a _serious_ msn-im feature that jabber lacks?

Well, there used to be jabberd quickstart. But it's now a few versions behind. Really though, jabberd is very well documented and not that difficult to set up. I know several people who have done it. Also ejabberd is becoming quite popular, but I haven't installed it yet, so I don't know how easy or difficult it might be. The hardest part is the transports, but core jabber functionality works by basically changing all the instances of localhost to your server name in the config file. And besides, users of AIM mostly aren't interested in running their own server, but they can definitely go ahead and download a client and start using one of the public servers. Many of them even offer the transports to legacy IM services.

YESSSS!!!

Jabber offers so much, including:

• Potential for full control of message path using an open and extensible protocol.
• Ability to carry messages over a secure connection (i.e. SSL); this is well supported.
• Flexibility to use different clients and servers, all which interoperate without the worry of a protocol change specifically designed to break 3rd party clients. There is no concept of a 3rd party client.
• Support for cross-communication to those other chat services with those awful EULAs, just as a stop-gap until the world becomes fully enlightened. This does NOT require a multi-protocol client... it is called a "transport", and it lives on a server. One login, full communication... that's easy!

There are a number of freely usable Jabber servers, so you can begin enjoying it right away, without setting up a server yourself. Just because you're using one server doesn't mean you can't talk to users on another. Your Jabber ID is in the form username@server, just like an e-mail address, so this ability is intrinsic to the design of Jabber. This is the beauty of a decentralized model.

An excellent Windows client is Exodus. A popular cross-platform client is Psi (based on Qt). Even the ubiquitous GAIM has support for Jabber. And very soon, iChat in Mac OS X will support Jabber! I've even considered making my own cross-platform Jabber client; isn't it great that we have that option? For more information on Jabber in general, visit jabber.org

The most widely used Jabber server software is jabberd 1.4. It is usable in Linux and Windows. For a concise comparison of open-source servers, click here. For a comprehensive list of Jabber servers (both open and commerial), click here.

NOW HEAR THIS -- Start using Jabber!

YESSSS!!!

Jabber offers so much, including:

• Potential for full control of message path using an open and extensible protocol.
• Ability to carry messages over a secure connection (i.e. SSL); this is well supported.
• Flexibility to use different clients and servers, all which interoperate without the worry of a protocol change specifically designed to break 3rd party clients. There is no concept of a 3rd party client.
• Support for cross-communication to those other chat services with those awful EULAs, just as a stop-gap until the world becomes fully enlightened. This does NOT require a multi-protocol client... it is called a "transport", and it lives on a server. One login, full communication... that's easy!

There are a number of freely usable Jabber servers, so you can begin enjoying it right away, without setting up a server yourself. Just because you're using one server doesn't mean you can't talk to users on another. Your Jabber ID is in the form username@server, just like an e-mail address, so this ability is intrinsic to the design of Jabber. This is the beauty of a decentralized model.

An excellent Windows client is Exodus. A popular cross-platform client is Psi (based on Qt). Even the ubiquitous GAIM has support for Jabber. And very soon, iChat in Mac OS X will support Jabber! I've even considered making my own cross-platform Jabber client; isn't it great that we have that option? For more information on Jabber in general, visit jabber.org

The most widely used Jabber server software is jabberd 1.4. It is usable in Linux and Windows. For a concise comparison of open-source servers, click here. For a comprehensive list of Jabber servers (both open and commerial), click here.

NOW HEAR THIS -- Start using Jabber!

I will probably in the future migrate to a Jabber server.
However, in the past I tried with JabberD2 http://jabberd.jabberstudio.org/2/ and it was not easy to get it running.
I have not tried any of the commercial Jabber servers yet.
The nice thing about AltMe is that it s so easy to set up. No install required. Just double click and go...

This is nothing new and has already been done and implimented in the JetiAnts project .With a bit of tweaking this will offer a Jabber Messenger in the form of JETI a Java Jabber client and Ants P2P
a Java Ad hock network that offers encryption ,resume,and multisource downloads it also has a rudimentary webserver for viewing pages "annonymously" out of the box .Ants uses IRC for bootstraping .Why create a new client when it is already there .

Actually, Jabber has found a very good niche doing behind the scenes work in lots of commercial software. For example, we were using it in my last job writing console video games. We're also looking to use it in a current voip product at my new company. The thing is, most of this work uses LGPL/BSD licensed libraries like iksemel so you'd never know that the underlying protocol driving that video game chat lobby is jabber unless you ran tcpdump on it.

There needs to be a Slashdot story done on the following application that is breaking new ground on almost a daily basis .Soon there will be Jabber support for this application via Jeti Java Messenger http://jeti.jabberstudio.org/ .

Ants P2P Website
http://www.myjavaserver.com.nyud.net:8090/~gwren/h ome.jsp?page=custom&xmlName=ants
Ants P2P Sourceforge Page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/antsp2p/

Ants P2P Features

* Open Source Java implementation (GNU-GPL license).
* Multiple sources download.
* Torrent download from partial files.
* Automatic resume and sources research over the net.
* Search by hash, string and structured query.
* Embedded support for etherogeneus data types (not only arrays of bytes...).
* Completely Object-Oriented routing protocol.
* Point to Point secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* EndPoint to EndPoint secured comunication: DH(512)-AES(128)
* Automatic serverless peer dicovery procedure.
* IRC based peer discovery system.
* IRC embeded chat system.
* Full text search of indexed documents (pdf, html, txt, doc etc) -> QUERY REFERENCE.
* Distributed/Decentralized Search engine
* HTTP tunneling.

The programers answers to all those damn FAQ's

1) ANts supports point to point encription (AES 128 - DH 512)
2) ANts supports endpoint encryption ( " " )
3) ANts supports multipath routing for packets
4) ANts supports preferential connections (to create a fast backbone and
to let everyone going faster)
5) ANts supports PARTIAL DOWNLOADS and it has a unique and very
innovative system to do this (in theory it could be better than
bittorrent inspite of routing overhead and speedes reached on LAN showed
this!)
6) ANts supports AUTOSEARCH SOURCES function for active and interrupted
donwloads, if your donwload pass in the interrupted box this DOES NOT
MEAN that you have lost it... it is just paused and it will restart as
soon as possible!
7) ANts can find partial files through normal queries or queries by hash
since version 0.4.1 beta!
8) ANts supports FULL TEXT indexing and do searches over full file
content and FULL FILE PATH LOCATION.
9) ANts will (perhaps) support instant messaging integration
10) ANts IS NOT a simple IRC client
11) ANts relies on ad-hoc network theory as well as MUTE
12) ANts is strongly beta... this means it is not intended to be dummies
probed!
13) ANts releases ARE NOT backward compatible, so if you can't find
peers you probably has an old version! Use Java Web Start to be sure to
have te newest one.
14) ANts exploits IRC CTCP commands for initial ip exchange!
15) ANts supports internal ip exchage during and after your first
connection.
16) ANts queries are cripted in an asymmetric way. This means YOU are
the ONLY who can read you queries results. Everyone can read the query
string but this approach reduces drastically the potential power of a
node in trasit queries analisys.
17) ANts uses TWO consecutive ports (Like HTTP does) default are 4567 &
4568 but you can change the lower getting automatically changed the
highest. If you are NATTED you don't need two non consecutive ports,
cause these ports are used ONLY for incoming requests. Your own requests
are made on any free port, so you don't have to care, it can take a
little bit more to obtain your first connection if you are natted, but
ANts can work with natted peers as well as with unnatted ones without
ANY difference
17) Internal protocol is not harmed by nats and firewall... so once you
get a connection it doesn't make sense saying "I'm natted my queries are
not working!".
1

My understanding is that if you were to write an external component that communicated with the server over tcp/ip then it doesn't matter what license that component uses, even if the server itself is gpl. But if you want to write a module that integrates with the server internally then you do need to worry about licenses...

Jive software are the same people who put out the smack xmpp java library which is imho very well written, so I suspect that the server is also quite good.

It's good to have another opensource jabber server as I think jabberd2 has been a bit of a disappointment. I doubt it will be as good as ejabberd though.

When it comes to MacOS X, there are several worthy contenders: Fire, Adium to name a few.

One big problem I have with Fire is its lack of good Jabber support. Basics are there, but I can't reliably use it for group chatting. (It might not even support it, IIRC)

For Jabber, I've had to use Nitro to get the group support I needed. And on Linux (since I have an ancient RH 8 box) I end up using Gabber instead of GAIM

The best Jabber server in my opinion is ejabberd. It does scale very well and is really very easy to configure.

See: http://ejabberd.jabberstudio.org/

--
Mickael Rémond
http://www.erlang-projects.org/

.. and let me add that Jabber is, like most (not all) things OSS, nothing but a ... copy of a commercial service.

Where's video or audio IM

buddy icons

I've tried some of the Jabber client (e.g. GAIM) and they are awful ... in terms of both ease of use and functionality.

Put it in Firefox? Done.

But another question, why not Thunderbird? A jabber message of type 'message' looks like a regular email, accept you have the bonus of presence. Maybe hit a button, and you can open up a message window of type 'chat'.

This would be a great idea, and I'm certain that it would be used more then say, usenet support in thunderbird.

Our company uses an internal Jabber server, and all the Windows desktops have the Exodus client installed upon them.

It's great for chatting to people in other offices, makes people feel a lot more in contact, and it's a lot more immediate than using email.

I've known a lot of local companies using Jabber too - even though I'm sure sometimes the PHBs don't realise it's free software, snuck under the rader..

2?
We had a company with 3000 (max) people and had more servers than that for exchange and I think we had two on top of that that just talked to the "real" UNIX based MTA's that talked to the outside world and our internal UNIX systems.

I think they are lowballing you and you will be fucked if you try to run a 5000 monkey org that is email intensive on 2 boxes. YMMV and IANAMSG (MS Guy), I just had to try to get them to make exchange work with SMTP.

My experience with email is that people use it as an IM system when one is not available, so do yourself a favor, if you can, and add a jabber server and some nice IM clients for internal use - ejabberd is a fast, extremely scalable, low resource use server based on erlang, a high concurrency language used in phone switching systems. If introducea stand alone IM service before your new email system, it will do two things - soften the bumps during the transition between email systems (because people will still be able to communicate during down times) and people will already be sending their "where do you want to go for lunch?" and "can't make the meeting, still on conf.call" stuff via the IM system before the new system is in place and will be less likely to start using the new email system for IM type msgs; thus reducing the throw away traffic that tends to clog email systems.

Which server did you use, I was looking at this one recently:
ejabberd

It is supposed to be fault tolerant and high throughput.

TIA for any advice.

I currently use Fire which has become pretty stable now.
Its interface, while still not apple-slick, has a lot more to offer over Psi, which is actually a KDE application.

A very simple Jabber program is Nitro which I alternatively use.

You don't think Yahoo tried to block third party clients? I suggest you look at this source file from the yahoo transport for jabber, search the page for the word 'complicated' and read the comment the first result appears in.

Jabber + Thunderbird? Someone's working on it!

From the Jabberzilla homepage:

This project has the goal to integrate Jabber instant messaging into the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client.

This is not a solution, it's just a short term dirty hack. The long term solution is NGMP (Next Generation Mail Protocol) or similar protocols whch makes mail storage the responsibility of the sender. There is already some form of a working implementation at JabberStudio. Yes, it's also going to integrate with Jabber style open IM fine.

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has been around for a long time and AFAIK is a binary protocol. SIMPLE is built on top of SIP and provides the instant messaging functionality.

XMPP is relatively new and is based on XML (hence why it's so extensible.) There are two parts, the core (which might as well be equivalent to SIP's core) and the IM extensions.

The glaring practical difference is that there seem to be about zero open-source SIP servers, and about a dozen open-source XMPP servers (going off the list at JabberStudio which might not represent all of them.)

Server admins go here for an updated version.

Well, let's test that theory. I'll install Exodus on my wife's Windows PC sitting next to me.

1. Download the current version
2. Start the installer; it asks you to read and "I Agree" to the GPL, then takes you to a "what do you want to install?" page. (Exodus does not install SSL support by default, but it's not essential.)
3. It asks you which folder you want it stored in, do you want shortcuts on the desktop, blah blah bkah -- basically the same install as 99% of the other crap that people install on Windows every day. It seems to me if people can get KaZaa installed, they can install Exodus.
4. When you launch Exodus for the first time, it asks you for a username. It pre-selects "jabber.org" as your jabber server, asks you to enter a password, and has a checkbox to save your password.
5. I fill in the username "TrentCtest" and my password, check the "save password" box, and try to connect.
6. Exodus tells me there is no account by that name, and asks if I would like to register it.
7. I Click "OK", and it tells me my new Jabber account is registered, and asks if I would like to fill out additional registration information. I decline.

Gee, connecting to Jabber doesn't seem to be any more difficult than connecting to Yahoo and MSN Messenger, and people seem to install those every day as well.

Jay (=

Well, let's test that theory. I'll install Exodus on my wife's Windows PC sitting next to me.

1. Download the current version
2. Start the installer; it asks you to read and "I Agree" to the GPL, then takes you to a "what do you want to install?" page. (Exodus does not install SSL support by default, but it's not essential.)
3. It asks you which folder you want it stored in, do you want shortcuts on the desktop, blah blah bkah -- basically the same install as 99% of the other crap that people install on Windows every day. It seems to me if people can get KaZaa installed, they can install Exodus.
4. When you launch Exodus for the first time, it asks you for a username. It pre-selects "jabber.org" as your jabber server, asks you to enter a password, and has a checkbox to save your password.
5. I fill in the username "TrentCtest" and my password, check the "save password" box, and try to connect.
6. Exodus tells me there is no account by that name, and asks if I would like to register it.
7. I Click "OK", and it tells me my new Jabber account is registered, and asks if I would like to fill out additional registration information. I decline.

Gee, connecting to Jabber doesn't seem to be any more difficult than connecting to Yahoo and MSN Messenger, and people seem to install those every day as well.

Jay (=

I think the most significant reason jabber isn't more widely used is people network effects, not the clients. Most people use one network, and so do their friends. It's like file formats.

To grow the jabber userbase someone (you) needs to take a lead - Register a jabber ID (and use it, obviously not on it's own :P) regardless of if you have any jabber contacts to start with - As more people get dissatisfied they will get a jabberid. I did this a year ago and now I have most of my contacts on jabber :)

Use jabber for IM

Jabber
Jabberstudio - most jabber projects are listed

The OSS community already has developed an IM protocol that is decentralised, secure, open, free, does messaging and file transfer, etc. etc., known as Jabber.

Check it out. Sure, it doesn't yet have audio/video support as part of the main standard, but it's based on XML so anyone can extend it with their own "many and splendid" apps, and uses transporst to connect to other messaging systems like ICQ or IRC. I recommend Exodus as a good basic Windows client, the Jabber website lists many more.

As we've seen with the impending MSN shutout, we use proprietry IM systems at their owner's leisure. The sooner there's an open and decentralised IM standard the better, regardless of whether it's Jabber or not.

I don't think you dislike Jabber... I think you tried one or two, probably half-baked, clients and disliked those.

A couple years ago, I tried quite a few Jabber clients for Windows 98 (including at least Winjab and JIM), but I disliked them because they ate a sizable chunk of System Resources (that is, the 64 KB gdi.exe and user.exe heaps inherent in Windows 9x) and crashed quite often. Has this been fixed in the newer Jabber clients for Windows? Is Exodus any better?

Thus, it depends on the particular Jabber server(s) you use

Actually, the servers all still need to use a transport, and AFAIK, there is only the one, outdated MSN transport. And as I said above, that transport will need to be updated before October as it uses an older MSN protocol.
-dr

IANAJE (Jabber Expert), but I believe that Jabber is missing the metaphors that would make it suitable for email. Like IRC, Jabber messages are ephemeral -- you get one from the server, and the server is done with it. Your client may cache the history, but there's no server-side persistence, per se. There are also no mechanisms for organizing, fetching parts of messages, or other message organizing stuff that you get with, say IMAP.

That said, there is a Jabber-SMTP gateway that translates from SMTP -> Jabber and vice versa, but this basically just lets you use your Jabber IM client as an interface to email. It doesn't address the issues that people want a new SMTP protocol for.

Jabber is extensible, and I don't know if it is extensible enough to provide more control over how the server stores messages -- which is what it would need to replace a mail server. However, if it did have these extensions, then Jabber would be a great solution. It would blur the lines between IM and email to the point where email might just disappear.

Note that when I talk about Jabber messages, I'm speaking of that category of messages which most resemble email: they have subjects as well as content, and can also have attachments.

Sorry Jabber is only the protocol / architecture of the IM and the jabber.com site does only offer win versions. There are many open source Java clients written which implement the jabber protocol such as Swagger which I'm currently using. You can check it out here

It's experimental/proof-of-concept but there's Public CVS - I was just pointing out that logging all messages isn't a big deal (with jabber).

Of course it can't get keys for end-end encryption. There's not much point in logging encrypted messages, but I was sugesting gpg as a counter-measure to snooping on public servers - within an organisation which wanted to log messages they would need cooperation (perhaps as a condition of employment) from the workers. This is common to all comunications, and not a jabber specific problem (jabber just (optionally) offers a standardised integrated way of using end-to-end encryption).

With JabberYou can do Server side logging easily with the msglog Component. Of course this applies to public servers as well (just like any IM where the messages go through the server). If that bothers you you should use something like GPG (which works well with jabber).

GAIM has gotten far more stable on windows betwen 0.59 and 0.64. You might want to try again.

It still feels a little bit clunky though - partially because of using GTK (tooltips sticking after you switch program).

I'm back to Exodus only (with an AOL/ICQ gateway).

--
This is not a signature

It seems you missed the point of Jabber.

Jabber is (for now) an instant messaging protocol that provides so many features that you would be amazed. Most of them are not present nowadays on propietary IM, but maybe they'll copy them from Jabber later. Some are 'server temporal storage of messages if contact is unavailable' or 'server based filter rules' and a lot more.

Perhaps you can't find their utility now, as you have been induced to think propietary IM has everything you would ever need. Just wait.

Reading your comments about some client with so many strange options, it seems you are talking about JAJC client. Please try the other three main Jabber clients (all of them GPL'ed) and you will see that every person-requirement has a client ;)
Psi (multiplatform),
Tkabber (Tcl/Tk) and
Exodus (Borland Delphi).

More clients on jabber.org

Some clients' screen captures

Actually, the first 'release' of Gabber2 was made available today. You can get it here [jabberstudio.org]

Start Shameless Plug:
I have an open source client called Exodus which installs and runs on Win95.
http://exodus.jabberstudio.org for more info.

Exodus works well for me.

You can find a list of Jabber clients (and other usefull apps and utils) on Jabber Studio page. I'm sure you can find something that will work just fine.

If you want a quick jabber server setup you should look at JabberD Quickstart

From the page:

The JabberD Quickstart package provides a graphical, user-friendly way to install, configure, and manage the JabberD instant messaging server. No hand-editing of XML files, no need to create spool directories, no messy configuration changes -- just a simple, step-by-step setup script that does all the work for you. It's the easy way to get started with Jabber. :)

If you're using Windows, Exodus is a pretty nice Jabber client. Miranda is also excellent, it's an ICQ client, but with tons of plugins (and you can even turn ICQ off). Get Miranda's latest Jabber plugin.

In Linux I use Gabber.