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Jabber Gathers Steam In Australia
Jeremy Lunn writes "Jabber is on a rolling start in Australia with this article featured in The Age in Melbourne (and the Sydney Morning Herald) 'Jabbering classes push for more power' and the formation of Jabber Australia."
Jabbering classes push for more power
By Nathan Cochrane
June 10 2003
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A small band of Australian advocates of open source has joined a growing worldwide army trying to wrest the power of instant messaging away from Titans such as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, handing it back to individuals and the enterprise.
Imagine if you were to send an email but it bounced back because the recipient lacked the software to understand your message. Or if you tried to make a phone call, but were told by a canned voice that your phone number was not recognised. That is the state of instant messaging (IM) today.
A user must install several IM clients - software chat programs - on their PC to communicate with others, and online chats often cannot be easily carried between services. Although some clients understand a variety of IM systems, they are not widely used and are liable to breaking at the whim of the entrenched proprietary IM providers, such as Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft.
Dubbed "the Linux of IM", Jabber is an XML protocol devised in 1998 that transfers messages in real time across the internet. Its open-source, open-standard architecture readily allows individuals and organisations to create their own services on servers they own.
A side effect is greatly enhanced security and robustness of communications because messages are not sent in the clear to servers on the other side of the world over the insecure internet.
Jabber clients - software programs such as RhymBox that exploit the underlying Jabber architecture - also work with proprietary standards, providing the best of both worlds and unplugging the IM bottleneck.
Jabber's heavyweight backers include Intel, H-P, Sony, IBM and Hitachi, and telcos including BellSouth in the US and Orange. It is being formalised as XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol), an internet standard, by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Despite such impressive achievements, the adoption of Jabber in Australia has been slow, which is the reason an advocacy and technology steering group, Jabber Australia, was formed in Melbourne this week, says its founding president, Jeremy Lunn.
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server, but there are far fewer users here and so far only 20 people have responded to the request for help on Jabber Australia's jabber.org.au website, Lunn says.
But the local chapter has high-level support from the Jabber Software Foundation in the US that pioneers the protocol. On its board is Melbourne-based Robert Norris, a Jabber Software Foundation council member and lead developer of the open-source JabberD 2 server.
"The key advantage in Jabber remains in the openness," says Lunn. "Jabber doesn't tie consumers to any one program or service provider. Consumers will now have a choice."
Lunn sees Microsoft's and AOL's decision last week to sign a $US750 million peace treaty, making their rival systems compatible or "interoperable", as a "half-baked" yet positive step towards knitting together the IM archipelago.
"It still doesn't allow people to run their own servers, such as in Australia, whether they be individuals, ISPs or businesses," he says.
However, it will make things much easier for users of Jabber because less code needs to be maintained for Jabber to interoperate with other networks, Lunn says. "When these systems do open up to the public, providing they use an open standard as the protocol, it's good for Jabber and all IM users, regardless of whether it's SIMPLE (session initiation protocol for instant messaging and presence leveraging extensions protocol) or the Jabber protocol."
Jabber faces competition from SIMPLE, also wending its way through the Internet Engineering Task Force a few steps behind, which has the support of IBM and Microsoft. But critics such as Lunn say SIMPLE is as simple does - it lacks the functionality and purpose of XMPP/Jabber.
"Although SIMPLE has some great advantages in compa
Here is some info for those of you who would like to know more about Jabber and how it's doing in AU.
/ 13 152
r ou ps.htm
http://www.jabber.org.au/
http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid
http://www1.hurgh.org:81/
http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_G
I'm not sure a lot of people got your reference to SIP/SIMPLE .. so .. sorry for pointing out the obvious.
it's in my head
Moreover, Psi (psi.sourceforge.net) is a perfectly usable (just like ICQ) and cross-platform client. If GNOME is your style, there's Gabber.
So, what's the real problem?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Because I have insominia...
3 152
u ps.htm
http://www.jabber.org.au/
http://australia.internet.com/r/article/jsp/sid/1
http://www1.hurgh.org:81/
http://support.jabber.com/jimhelpfiles/Shared_Gro
And to prove I'm not karma whoring.... I'll post anonymously.
This problem was solved ages ago by Trillian, but AOL are always trying to kill it off. Isn't Jabber just *another* IM standard?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Who's the idiot that mods a link to the SIP/SIMPLE standards "troll"??
SIP = Session Initiated Protocol. Hey people - this is what routes your telephone calls now and more so in the future.
SIMPLE = SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions.
it's in my head
Also covered in this article at linmagau.
Slackers at The Age are always behind the curve.
Jabber rocks....
I have my gf using Psi under Windblowz. I've tried some other windows clients but this seemed to be the best. BTW, jabber me under guruz@jabber.bawue.net ;)
i've been using miranda for a while now.
it allows for protocol plugins so that you can use it with different IM networks. Check the site, people have been making tons. they get pretty whacky too, i know game server plugins exist. maybe a jabber plugin too. it puts it all into one nice clean little client unless you want it ugly and bloated and trillianish.
miranda itself doesn't give you a server to IM everybody on but the way it's designed it should be simple to modify it so that it does. this is the biggest difference between miranda and jabber.
miranda is open source, but the program is buggy (maybe only for me, maybe because i'm using windows client). so hurrah for them.
Jabber is a great protocol and it has a lot of flexibility in it and will expand into who know what in the future. It is also quite popular here and it became my main IM protocol a few months ago. I use Miranda IM with Jabber plugin and it works perfectly stable. In Linux I use Gabber and it laso works just fine. I have a Jabber server runing on my home LAN and so we can easily chat even if the internet connection is down.
Thanks to all working on Jabber and clients for bringing us this great piece of code!
Live long and propser!
sorry : Here's the list
Ploum.net.
We recently deployed Jabber as our company IM protocol (yay, more waste of time). Unfortunately, our computers are somewhat backwards and the de facto standard has been Windows 95 (Yeah I know, I know) with a sprinkling of XP. The client that runs on the XP Machine is very, very nice. This client unfortunately doesn't run on 95. So we have a very substandard substitute for most of our workers. (BTW, If anyone knows of a good looking Jabber Client that runs on 95, I would be very grateful). Anyways, apart from client issues. The best bit about Jabber is that you can set up your own server, independent of ones run by the producers of the product (ala Yahoo or ICQ). So it is very good in a business setting where you want everyone to keep in touch without clogging email or wasting phone time.
Yes, server to server connections are a normal thing in Jabber. In fact, a jabber userID (the JID which identifies a user or a service on a server) resembles an e-mail address - it has a form of: user@domain.
For example I've created a simple HOWTO on setting up server to server connections with Jabberd 1.4.2 on OpenBSD, you can read it here.
Moreover, Jabber protocol uses UTF-8 encoding for all communication and config files, so there are no problems with different character encodings - you don't have to mess with anything to write messages with polish diacritical characters, chinese, cyrillic or arabic!
Actually, the Jabber protocol is gaining quite a big popularity here in Poland as more people are getting tired with local proprietary IM system called GaduGadu which provides the official client only for windows (although multiple unofficial have been created for Linux and BSD).
There's also a central web site for Jabber in Poland, and already there are multiple public servers like chrome.pl or jabber.atman.pl.
The largest polish web portal, Wirtualna Polska has even provided its own public Jabber server and has developed official client that supports voice and video chat through Jabber!
It's good to see Australia go in the same direction!
The best Jabber client (IMHO) is PSI.. http://psi.affinix.com
It works for Windows, Linux & Mac OS X, and uses QT.
It's under very active development, although there has not been a release for a while.
Version 0.9test1 has full support for encrypted messaging. On a system with GnuPG installed and setup it works pretty much out of the box. There is no automatic exchange of keys though, you can use something like GPG Agent to do that for you.
As to working over port 80, you can always setup a server yourself with port 80 open. But if you meant working over an http proxy, I don't think so.
Hope that helps... Happy Jabbering! =)
Jabber Australia was incorporated several days ago, and has half a dozen young enthusiasts on the committee. The article in The Age probably ran a little early, because we don't currently have any services to offer the public...yet. We are in the process of putting together our website/forums/server/services, and it should all be up and running within a week or so.
:)
Our current website is very basic, but it's standing up to the Slashdot Effect so far.
- Tony (Jabber Australia Committee)
Some people may also be interested to see our coverage in LinMagAU
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
GAIM [1] has (limited, I think) jabber support and is also available for Windows.
GAIM also has 'native' support for MSN and ICQ and is pretty stable.
[1] http://gaim.sf.net
IRC servers can only connect between specific servers -- think of it like a tree. If you knock off a 'hub' server -- a branch -- then all the leaves off that hub are gone.
Jabber, however, is more like e-mail. Any Jabber server can talk to any other Jabber server. Which, yes, like with e-mail means one specific Jabber server might be down, but like e-mail, it means the entire network doesn't fold.
--Rachel
Except, and if you'd even looked at any article about Jabber for more than five seconds you'd know this, Jabber does let you talk to your friends using MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo. And without any wierd client-side stuff, either! In fact, that's what I use Jabber for right now - a nicer client for talking to all my friends who use ICQ/AIM/whatever.
Determining how Jabber performs this magic is left as an exercise for the reader.
Some Jabber clients have end-to-end encryption, but the standard on that is still a little shaky. It's basically just a PGP signing and encryption method.
;)
Best Jabber client for Windows presently really depends on what you need and want. Jabberstudio.org has a lot of good ones. Psi is an excellent one, RhymBox is a very clean and easy-to-use one, Exodus has a very plain and un-glitzy UI, but tends to support damned near every part of the protocol that pgm can cram into it. In my opinion, Psi's a good choice for folks coming from the Linux realm, RhymBox is a good choice for Windows-only folks, and Exodus is a great tool if you're a Jabber dev who wants to poke and things (and periodically blow up Exodus by sending it malformed XML while testing).
--Rachel
IMO the best jabber client for the windows platform (and linux platform) is Psi - http://psi.affinix.com - I don't use jabber any more (I use Miranda www.miranda-im.org) - Mainly because I had to take my jabber server offline for a while. When I put it back up, I am still going for Psi as a client!
The server runs on any port you wish! I ran mine on port 23 for a while (as a consultant in a firm where they had closed a lot of ports)...
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
In Poland, a million users hang off a single server
The server mentioned is run by tlen.pl, Poland's fastest growing communicator. Tlen has taken a big chunk out of both gadu-gadu and icq, both with notoriously poorly written clients and technical problems on the server-side. Tlen's approach has been similar to MSN's - along with a IM account you automatically get an email acct, which you can check in the communicator itself. It's actually a pretty nice package, if you can ignore the banner ads and the fact that they're up to version 4 and *you still can't search the archive*.
Jabber is more than "just" an instant messaging thing - it's a simple bidirectional socket-based generic DTD-less XML protocol that is computer-language agnostic. Unlike the request/response model of HTTP, Jabber messages are asynchronous (unsolicited messages allowed in both directions) and share a single socket connection until the session is complete. In each direction on the socket you have a single-rooted XML document. Each Jabber message is basically a sub-node of this document as parsed by your favorite SAX-style parser firing a callback when the message is received. There are some manditory tags for joining groups, broadcasting and requesting info among other things. For the most part you just support the message types that you care about and you can add your own application-specific messages with custom XML payloads. If a Jabber client or server is not familiar with a message type it is ignored. Nice. Simple. Effective.
I think the e-mail metaphor is a very nice one when explaining what jabber is to newbies.
Unlike most other IMs, where there is only one server (no more than one adress for accessing the server(s)) the Jabber network is built up by lots of servers communicating with each other, like e-mail.
Your jabber address looks and works a lot like your e-mail addresse. User@jabber.org or User@mail.com, same functionality, different protocols. A pretty obvious and shallow observation, but is very useful when explaining for newbs.
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The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
Let me list some of its main advantage:
The analogy with current email system is hard to miss. Think how bad it would be if you are forced to use joe@hotmail.com and joe@aol.com as the only way to exchange emails. Even worse, you have to log into joe@aol.com if you want to send email to bob@aol.com, and then having to log into joe@hotmail.com to send an email to alice@hotmail.com. Not to mention that having to use the name joe2001@icq.com because joe@icq.com is already taken by somebody else.
Shameless plug: please try our jabber client at
www.akeni.com. It is runs natively on both Windows and Linux. It has some nice features such as tabbed chat window.
MSNM seems to have the most people
NO! I see this claimed constantly, and its simply not true.
AOL IM has many times the active users of MSN's IM software. Now, thats not counting "has the client installed", which would mean almost all Windows users. Most of them don't use it though! My sister had no idea what it even was until I told her! I'm betting msot people are the same way.
At our institution we have deployed jabber quite successfully. Our implementation is quite open, but for you it sounds like a little more lockdown is in order. The main things that I can think of to help your jabber buisness case are:
This really is not that huge of a list, but creating a security model that satisfies management, users and sysadmins is rarely easy. If your users truly want/need an IM to use, jabber is the way to go. What other system gives you the ability to make all of the above choices yourself?
Good luck in your endeavours!