The XMPP Newsletter, 29 June 2018

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News

Github has been acquired by Microsoft, prompting some FOSS developers with long memories to reconsider whether they still want to host their projects there.

The Salut à Toi project is working on a decentralized and federated solution for issues and merge requests, based on XMPP, and Jérôme Poisson explains in this article their motivation for doing this work.

Project MAXS, which stands for Modular Android XMPP Suite, allows you to control your Android device and receive notifications over XMPP.

XMPP vs Firebase: Choosing the right platform for real-time chat apps

Every now and then a blog post comparing XMPP and Firebase appears. Generally these posts seem to be poorly disguised attempts at SEO and to promote application development by a particular devshop. This submission seems to follow the trend and is also relatively superficial. It is however interesting to note that they mention multiple times that it's difficult to set up an XMPP server. Perhaps something to take note of and to consider how we could ease setup of an XMPP-based solution.

Monal has received a lot of updates last months and now it also has initial OMEMO support. More work needs to be done, so don't expect to see this in the App Store before August.

Software releases

Servers

The XMPP server written in Go has a new release with support for Websocket (RFC-6395), XEP-0191 (Blocking Command), XEP-0012 (Last Activity) and XEP-0237 (Roster Versioning).

The new release includes improved robustness of external authentication backends, support for REST API custom headers and more.

This release includes the so-called "Inbox" feature which was also discussed at the XSF summit in FOSDEM. It is a list of all ongoing conversations, with excerpts of last messages and unread messages count, to help you gain an overview of what happened while you were gone. There is no XEP for this yet, but Erlang Solutions have promised to submit one.

Clients

Monal 3.0.2 has been released.

JSXC 3.4.0 released including support for location sharing and improved roster management in our internal Nextcloud backend.

Libraries

Chris Ballinger has released Version 4.0 of XMPPFramework, the XMPP library for iOS and macOS. It brings support for XEP-0048: Bookmarks and XEP-0359: Stanza Ids. It also has improved Swift support with optional Swift-only features.