Daniel Gultsch

The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol is the foundation of a provider independent form of instant messaging. While XMPP - from a technical perspective - had some catching up to do in the last couple of years it is now ready to handle the vast majority of tasks a modern instant messaging solution is supposed to handle. (The process on how we got there has been documented in previous FrOSCon talks.) However an instant messaging system is only as good as it's implementations. This talk will look at the state of various open source implementations and at the broader XMPP community as a whole.

A common theme of previous talks on XMPP has always been "We had this interesting technical problem, found a solution to it and implemented it into one client". (Un)fortunately the XMPP ecosystem is made of more than just one client. While catching up with modern extensions and features is slow in a system that is almost exclusively developed by volunteers, it is still happening. This talk will give an overview of what various XMPP projects have been doing (implementation wise) over the last ~12 month and will try to explain why some features have been adopted more quickly than others. It will also show the various ways the XMPP community has been trying to lower the barrier of entry for new developers and bringing the community closer together by organizing regular Sprints (Hackathons) and local Meetups. The talk will also look into recent efforts of the community to unify the user experience across multiple clients.