[...]... XMPPrelated and other free-time-swallowing commitments Remko Tronçon My first words of gratitude go to my coauthors, Peter and Kevin Not only did they make the writing of this book an incredibly fun experience, but they are also the reason why I got into XMPP in the first place Thanks to Kevin, the other Psi developers, and the whole Psi userbase, I got the chance to take my first steps into the XMPP world... steps into the XMPP world Thanks to the support of “patron saint” Peter and the rest of the XMPP community, I was able to take this involvement one step further, and joined the conversation to define the XMPP standards The XMPP community is without a doubt one of the most pleasant and accessible groups of people out there on the interwebs Thanks to everyone out there who ever talked to me! My most... piloted his sailing ship around the Cape of Good Hope and probably stopped in various ports along the way Then your contact in Calcutta needed to write a reply and send it back to London in a similar fashion Not exactly instant messaging! With the invention of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal, the time was reduced to a month or two Air mail reduced the time further to a week or two, and eventually... deployment scenarios further in the appendixes.) However, for the purposes of addressing on the network, all we need to care about is the domain name itself (e.g., jabber.org or gmail.com), rather than the lower-level machine names and IP addresses Finally, for ASCII characters, the domain portion of a JID is case-insensitive (so that JABBER.ORG is the same as jabber.org); as we explain later, the rules for... of the core XMPP services in detail Summary | 9 CHAPTER 2 Basics of XMPP This chapter outlines the fundamental features used by all XMPP-based applications We first describe the generic architecture of XMPP systems and then the addressing scheme for XMPP communications, the three communication “primitives,” the model for sharing information about availability on the network (called presence), and the. .. and the emergence of the real-time Internet Above all, this book provides a practical guide to XMPP Because XMPP is a welldocumented protocol, we regularly refer you to the XMPP specifications for relevant details (these specifications come in two flavors: the core protocols are defined in the Requests for Comments or “RFC” series published by the IETF, and dozens of extensions are defined in the XMPP... Throughout this book, we use the terms “Jabber” and “XMPP” interchangeably These technologies were originally developed by Jeremie Miller and the Jabber open source community in 1998–1999 When the community submitted its core protocols to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2002, it chose the name “Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol” to distinguish the protocol from the broader technology... resources that otherwise would be wasted on polling 6 | Chapter 1: Introduction Voice over IP (VoIP) The Google Talk application that launched in August 2005 first popularized the use of XMPP for voice chat Since then, the XMPP extensions for media session services (called Jingle) have been formalized through the XSF, and have been implemented and deployed by the likes of Nokia and the One Laptop Per... single software project or company The XMPP specifications define open protocols that are used for communication among network entities Much as HTTP and HTML define the protocols and data formats that power the World Wide Web, XMPP defines the protocols and data formats that power real-time interactions over the Internet The protocols are as free as the air, which means they can be implemented in code... reviewers for their thorough comments on, and insight into, the contents of this book; it was greatly improved by their input Thank you Dave Cridland, Brian Dainton, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Michelle Fisher, Nathan Fritz, and Jack Moffitt Peter Saint-Andre Thanks are due to the many developers who helped me understand these technologies as they were being designed in the early days of the Jabber open .