Welcome to JaIM.at’s public Jabber Instant Messaging (IM) service, you can interact with millions of other Jabber users worldwide!
Please register your Jabber ID with a jabber client of your choice to join the Jabber network, if you want a web client there’s jappix.jaim.at a full featured, web based jabber client available.
Jabber is an excellent and secure instant messaging protocol. You can choose your own server to use, similar to mail. A list of available clients for various platforms is available at xmpp.org.
The owners of JaIM.at are not responsible for the content of our users’ pages and input. JaIM.at provides no warranty that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. We assume no liability, expressed or implied, for any downtime for any reason.
Enjoy! FRZ
Good news from the XSF – the RFCs relating to XMPP have been published by the IETF:
The RFC Editor has announced that RFC 6120 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core), RFC 6121 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Instant Messaging and Presence) and RFC 6122 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Address Format) are now official RFC documents produced by the IETF!
The RFC Editor has announced that RFC 6120 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core), RFC 6121 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Instant Messaging and Presence) and RFC 6122 (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Address Format) are now official RFC documents produced by the IETF!
This is a huge milestone for the XSF because it means that the core specifications for XMPP have been updated to incorporate years of implementation and deployment experience with our technologies. The basic building blocks for creating XMPP-enabled applications are more stable and more clearly defined than ever, giving developers a solid foundation for open-source projects, commercial products, and real-time services on the Internet.
Well done, XSF IETF team!
Businesses recognise that instant messaging can help to improve employee productivity, but are often reluctant to sanction its use due to concerns about security. This Strategic Guide examines the real risks associated with instant messaging in corporate environments and explains how to mitigate them.
Download the document:
English version:Strategic Guide: Instant Messaging and Security (PDF). French version: Guide Stratgique:Messagerie instantane & Scurit(PDF).Finally I gave a look at Android's XMPP APIs and tested them.
The good news is that XMPP is supplied as system service and applications can use it with just few lines of code. There is also a rudimentary message passing system for exchanging "Intents" (that's how they have called asynchronous events used for IPC, a generalization of d-bus I guess) between applications in different phones and that's really nice.
Besides this, the first look at the APIs is disappointing. The people who have designed the XMPP service had only text messaging in mind and the approach they followed is really limiting. There is no support for sending arbitrary xml, just a sendMessage method taking the "to" attribute and the content as parameters. It's not even possible sending your own stanzas, there are just few methods for handling the roster. I know the platform is still in its infancy, but they still need to work a lot for having a decent XMPP support, there are even J2ME clients that are far better (bombus and our lampiro, for example, implement much more of the protocol and allow full XMPP exploitation).
If things don't change, and I don't think they will change a lot in this first iteration, when you need to use XMPP on Android there is only one way: implement the stack using the good XML pull parser you find the in the SDK...
Paris, France - October 3, 2007 - Portugal Telecom has deployed ProcessOne's Instant Messaging solution as their core Instant Messaging platform. This leading european Internet Service Provider (ISP) has established a strong relationship with ProcessOne and is totally satisfied with the scalability and robustness of their new Instant Messaging system.
Owned by Portugal Telecom, SAPO is the largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Portugal. The company had a large online messaging community, but its existing server was simply not stable enough to cope with demand.
"We had daily interruptions in service, which were costing us customers," explains Pedro Melo, technical consultant at SAPO. "We worked with the existing supplier for quite a long time to try to resolve these stability issues, but it just got to the point when we couldn't put up with the costs and problems any longer."
As an ISP, the company needed a stable server to support its instant messaging (IM) capability and a more flexible platform for delivering a wider range of customer services. In addition, it needed a server that could scale horizontally as its customer base grew.
SAPO was already aware of ProcessOne and so contacted the company for its advice. "We discovered that ProcessOne solutions were already successfully powering some very big and growing sites, and this gave us all the reassurance we wanted," says Melo. "We didn't need to look any further."
Migrating platforms quicklyProcessOne specialises in developing high-performance messaging solutions based on the ejabberd server. A standard technology from the Internet Engineering Task Force, ejabberd is based on the widely accepted eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and offers a highly robust messaging platform. ejabberd is also an open source technology and is thus a secure choice for SAPO.
ProcessOne helped SAPO to prepare the migration from its existing server and then customise the technology. It advised the company about integration with its existing internal infrastructure and provided tools for load testing. The migration was completed very quickly and without any significant issues.
"We were up and running in less than two months," explains Melo. "ProcessOne was extremely helpful. The team was interested in our business, provided us with good advice and support and always reacted quickly if we had any issues."
SAPO is confident that it made the right decision in selecting an ejabberd-based platform. "ejabberd is the enterprise-class, large-scale deployment king," says Melo. "It has been working very, very well."
Living in an open worldSAPO has a longstanding commitment to open source technologies, so ejabberd provides a good fit with the company's IT strategy. If it needs to, the company knows that it can look into the code itself, diagnose problems and suggest fixes or customisations. "SAPO has a strong open source culture," explains Celso Martinho, CTO of SAPO. "Using open source software enables us to be innovative, flexible and reactive in a global market where the absence of these qualities can seriously hurt your business."
Through their work together, ProcessOne has produced a number of ejabberd product extensions to meet SAPO's specific business requirements, and SAPO now plans to make these extensions openly available to other users of ejabberd. SAPO also plans to publish the code it developed for migrating from its previous solution to the ejabberd platform, and it believes that this, in particular, will be very useful to other companies.
But it is not just the ejabberd technology that is open. ProcessOne also has a very open relationship with its clients. "The company provides us with access to its internal development site, so that we can see exactly what it is doing and the status of all tasks," explains Delfim Machado, technical project leader at SAPO. "Both sides feel that nothing is hidden."
Delivering integrated servicesSince going live with ejabberd, SAPO has been able to successfully use IM to enhance other services. For example, it has integrated its ejabberd server with its SMS network, so customers can now send messages to the mobile phones of friends and colleagues from their PCs using IM. Similarly, customers can elect to receive an IM message when a new comment is posted to their blog or when they receive an important email from a specific email address.
"We are really excited about all of the possibilities with ejabberd," says Melo. "The integration of IM with other services creates a really strong differentiator for us. In the future, we plan to integrate more and more services with IM."
In particular, SAPO plans to work with ProcessOne in the months ahead to extend the use of IM into the areas of multi-media and Voice over IP (VoIP). As new technology standards emerge, SAPO will also work with ProcessOne to integrate these into its ejabberd platform and services.
Martinho concludes: "ejabberd has proven to be a carrier-class solution. It has provided us with a robust and scalable platform that we can trust for our messaging projects. We have a strong relationship with ProcessOne and are very confident about the future."
Download the complete Case Study in PDF format: ProcessOne Provides a Stable and Flexible Instant Messaging Platform for leading European ISP
About ProcessOneBased in France, ProcessOne specialises in the development of high-performance messaging solutions. The company is actively developing the ejabberd server and offers strong commercial support for ejabberd installations around the world. More information about ProcessOne is available at http://www.process-one.net.
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For production systems gathering hundreds of thousands of users online having the ability to apply a patch on a system without having to restart it is a major feature. It allows them to offer a high-availability service.
In real deployed system, this is the type of feature that makes a difference. Our secret for ejabberd live code upgrade feature relies on Erlang. Bill Clementson has made a good job summarizing how it works on his blog: Live Code Update in Erlang.
After reading this article, this should now seems obvious for every one and a must-have feature for production systems.
You can now freely create a account on OneTeam.im and forward the link to your friends to share the experience. You need Firefox 2.0 to use it.
This web Instant Messaging client include many unique features, such as gateways, server-side messages archiving, rich native interface, avatar management, and so on.
Please be aware that OneTeam is still in beta stage and in very active development.
A forum is there to gather discussions, bug report and feature requests on OneTeam: OneTeam Forum
Thank you again for the big interest you have shown in OneTeam and for helping us making OneTeam the most user-friendly online Instant Messaging client.
Have fun !
Building a powerful chat system for a web company is a demanding task because you need to provide a scalable system where components can be organised on the largest possible cluster, with the finer possible granularity. We made a first step with Epeios. Epeios allows you to run ejabberd components on any XMPP server. It also allows you to run those components outside ejabberd, on a separate server.
In which situation is this useful ? For example with Epeios, you can run several instances of the same ejabberd component without increasing the number of pure ejabberd nodes.
With our brand new architecture called FlexArch, we have pushed the idea further. FlexArch is a concept that includes and embraces Epeios. The main idea behind our change is to have independant components that you can gather, move, or rewrite depending on the project needs.
In ejabberd 1 architecture, large parts of the software were monolothic. It was not possible to easily separate (i.e. with a configuration file) the connection manager and the socket manager, that are doing mostly house keeping tasks, from the core ejabberd, that need to focus on messages handling and processing.
The architecture of an ejabberd cluster and the flow of messages from client 1 to the client 3 (connected on different cluster nodes) are shown on the following diagram (simplified view):
With the Flexarch model it is possible to break the client manager into two parts:
The connexion and parsing can even be moved to one or several front-end computers. The architecture is efficient as it does not introduce any double parsing: front-ends and back-ends are exchanging parser XML data structures.
With this approach, the load and memory consumption can be distributed in a better way, between the front-end and the back-end systems.
The distribution mechanisms are relying on Erlang, so you can easily define your own balancing algorithm and you do not have to obey to a 1 to 1 mapping between backend and frontend.
Another strong advantage is that you can improve the fault tolerance mechanism in this approach. It is actually possible to write some code that keep the XMPP TCP connexion on the front-end but could survive to a loss of the back end managing its session (by “migrating” the process).
This component separation can be mixed with Epeios to increase flexibility. ejabberd keeps on relying on its unique clustered router, with no single point of failure.
By introducing Flexarch, we move further in term of components separation and scalability, while keeping the same level of reliability on the routing nodes. ejabberd is thus becoming even more flexible, making it the tool of choice for large and ambitious web chat architectures. If you add that to the fact that some components can become optional or can be rewriten to change their behaviour you know why ejabberd is becoming increasingly popular to develop interactive web applications and social networking tools.
ProcessOne's customers manage many of the largest standard-based instant messaging deployment in the world. They need a tool to really understand what's happening in their instant messaging cluster to quickly react to potential problems.
Large and industrial deployments of mission critical Instant Messaging services need a management tool:
to manage the cluster components to monitor the Instant Messaging cluster health to diagnose and troubleshoot potential problems in the cluster configuration or in the clients behavior.With TeamLeader, they now have the perfect tool to manage their system. TeamLeader gives them:
More information on the state of the Instant Messaging cluster. A view of what people are currently doing on their Instant Messaging cluster. An history of the packets and usage pattern of the system over a configurable period. An interface with their usual SNMP supervision tool, for integration in their system administration workflow.TeamLeader is available today for customers of our subscription program, as a licensed software. TeamLeader is currently able to supervise ejabberd Instant Messaging cluster, but can be extended in the future to support other XMPP based servers.
For more information on TeamLeader, visit: http://www.process-one.net/en/teamleader/
About ProcessOneProcessOne is a company specialized in high-performance messaging solutions. The company actively develops the ejabberd server and offers strong commercial support for ejabberd installations around the world. It has customers managing millions of registered users and, as a result, ProcessOne has emerged as one of the major messaging solution providers.
For more information, please visit: http://www.process-one.net/
Contact: contact@process-one.net
About ejabberdejabberd is a proven and highly scalable XMPP server with full features. Distributed under an Open Source license, the server currently powers many of the largest Jabber deployments in the world. It therefore accounts for several million registered users.
ejabberd is renowned for its cluster support which leads to unmatched features such as: a single domain can be served by a cluster of ejabberd nodes fault-tolerance: server can keep on running even if several nodes in the cluster fail scalability: cluster nodes can be added or removed on the fly without stopping the servers
For more informations, please visit: http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd
We have added a lot of improvements to our Enterprise Instant Messaging client since the start of the private beta test. We have polished the user interface and have added interesting new features. Both the overall user interface and the new features are demonstrated in video:
Avatars management is a tricky topic in Web based Instant Messaging client as the browser security model prevents the Javascript code from reading file from your hard drive. We however managed to add avatar management to OneTeam web version, as shown by the demo.
The Help Bot is a feature we are planning to improve in the future. This project will be submitted as a Google Summer of Code 2007 project. If this project is accepted, we are planning to extend the OneTeam help system but also add help features for various other available XMPP clients (such as PSI and Gajim). We feel that having an help chat bot is the right way to assist new XMPP / Jabber user in their discovery of their client and the feature of the protocol: You get started by chatting with the bot so this is a very good introduction.
At Process-one, we have always been performance freaks. ejabberd is without a doubt one of the most scalable XMPP servers around and we have a strong reputation among our customers. Pedro Melo from SAPO (Portugal Telecom) has recently said that on his blog:
Ejabberd is the enterprise-class large scale deployment king. He keeps on working even when you throw at it indecent amounts of traffic.
In the same direction, we have choosen a very fast and responsive technology to develop OneTeam our web based XMPP client.
It was not enough for us. We have reached 600,000 simultaneously connected users in a benchmark, but we now want to increase the performance to be able to pass the 1 million users mark on the same hardware (We can probably go further, but we would need more machines).
Angie is our codename for ejabberd Next Generation (NG). In a series of upcoming articles we are going to present and explain the finished and planned optimisations for the next ejabberd releases. We put our focus on three directions:
Is that enough for a teasing article ? 
I think so, so stay tuned !
Today at the Linux Solutions Event in Paris, ProcessOne unveilled the core of its extensible Instant Messaging client called OneTeam.
This new client can be used without any installation, to ease the deployment of the platform in large organisations. The client however offers a rich interface thanks to Mozilla Firefox technologies.
OneTeam handles presence, one-to-one chat, file tranfert, user business card and groupchat in realtime. Based on the XMPP protocol, it enables both secure and private chat inside the company, but can also be opened in a control manner to selected servers in partner organisations.
The development team has put a lot of effort on users productivity, with exclusive features to create work profiles matching the user mindset. For example, it is possible to be interrupted only by people working on the same project at a given time. Other messages will be delayed until a moment you have choosen. This feature set make it the perfect collaboration tool on the workplace.
A private beta of OneTeam is launched today on ProcessOne site: http://www.process-one.net/en/oneteam/
The project is expected to be largely available at the end of march 2007.
About ProcessOneProcessOne is a company specialized in high-performance messaging solutions. The company actively develops the ejabberd server and offers strong commercial support for ejabberd installations around the world. It has customers managing millions of registered users and, as a result, ProcessOne has emerged as one of the major messaging solution providers.
For more informations, please visit: http://www.process-one.net/
Contact: contact@process-one.net
Jabber