XMPP Interop Event wraps up

We wrapped up a very cool xmpp 2-day interop event today. It was great fun, and as expected, incredibly useful. We had 6 xmpp server implementations represented: XCP (Jabber-Inc), ejabberd (the erlang-based jabber server), wildfire, djabberd (the stuff built for livejournal), and soapbox, and Sun's implementation.

Things started very smoothly as all implementations were rapidly able to interoperate in the easy case (no security). Things got a lot trickier on the second day as we added cert-based authentications. Things were not quite up and running by then end, but we were reasonably close. For sure the prospect of an open, highly secure xmpp federation based on a pretty diverse set of implementations felt very real. Very exiting!

And in the process we found and fixed literally dozens of bugs right there on the spot. I would say this is probably worth at least a grueling 4 weeks of work if done in isolation.

But perhaps the best part for many of us was that we got to meet other community member face to face. There is not much better for your motivation than a good developer community fix.

More info about the event is available on the Jabber wiki. And I have little doubt that stpeter, among others, will blog about it.