Planet Jabber

Many of you have followed the launch of the ProcessOne Push Platform (P1PP) in our webinar. Thanks a lot! Here are a few tools that make PubSub a reality.

Our P1PP (ProcessOne Push Platform) has gone live: the dedicated PubSub XMPP service has finally become a reality, as we launched it during our webinar. Here is a short presentation.

P1PP in short

P1PP is mainly an open federated platform for "PubSub, the good parts", or "PubSub made easy". For now, it is mainly designed for developers:

• pubsub.p1pp.net: an open federated XMPP PubSub service
• p1pp command line: to manage your nodes and items in a console
• p1pp Javascript library: to integrate P1PP live pushes in your website, as authentified or anonymous users

For developers and XMPP geeks:

• Read our quickstart guide, for direct interaction in your favorite XMPP client's XML console
• Here is more exhaustive documentation containing all cases of stanzas

Webinar slides ProcessOne Push Platform: pubsub.p1pp.net View more presentations from ProcessOne Please comment!

We are waiting for your comments. So feel free to express your needs!

Stay tuned as we have more.

We’ve recently had a reorganisation of the solutions section of the website, which included adding a new Military XMPP page.

We released M-Link, our XMPP server, back in 2008 and have developed it further since to include a number of capabilities that make M-Link suitable for use in a Military deployment.

This new web page looks at two sample scenarios to show ways in which XMPP can be used, and requirements that need to be considered given the mix of communication methods likely to be available during a deployment. It goes on to look at the key features that make M-Link appealing to the military market.

After several months of development, version 0.4 of Movim is finally out!

This new release contains the following improvements:

• A very big bug was fixed on the session stability. It affected the identifiers of the BOSH session. For more details, have a look here.
• Many widgets have been rewritten and cleaned up to benefit from the latest improvements in the widgets'API.
• A lot of work was done on the cache, almost all data from the XMPP server are now copied in the database so the end users'session is always persistent, even after a rough page reload.
• The roster (contacts list) was rewritten so as to reorganise it and make it clearer. Contacts are now sorted by status, clicking on a contact opens up his profile, and clicking on the small bubble next to the name opens up a chat window.
• The chat was improved and now caches the last 20 messages. It also indicates when the contact is composing a new message.
• A lot of work was done on the feeds, and we implemented the Microblogging XEP. Users can now write and send messages on their feeds and read their contacts'feeds and comments instantly.

And many new features were added:

• The avatars are now processed with the GD library, then cached in the web browser for several hours. This way the pages generated by Movim are only a few kB of HTML code ; the CSS and javascript code are also cached in the browser.
• Movim now supports account creation on both the node and the XMPP server. The implementation handles many error cases and notifies the user as to what problem was encountered while creating the account (existing username, weak password etc.).
• When a new message is receive in Movim and the page is in the background, a [1] is prepended to the page title, and an HTML5 notification (soon to be standardised) is emitted. Firefox users need to intall this add-on to benefit from this feature.
• Two small patches allow Movim to be installed on HTTPS-only servers and to communicate with the XMPP server through a proxy.

You can find more details on the 0.4 roadmap.

Finally, the page pod.movim.eu was created to list all known Movim servers on which you can create an account an try the software in a couple of clicks.

You can download this new release over there.

Have fun!

G'day everybody

after the shell pipe over XMPP, here is a new feature in "Salut à Toi": collective radio.

The idea is: you are in a chat room with a common playlist, and everybody can add a song to the playlist. The song is played simultaneously for everybody, making it a collective radio experiment.

So far, there are maximum 2 songs in queue, as soon as one song is played, anybody can add a new one. In the future, we can imagine a more sophisticated system to choose who can add a song in queue (e.g. each one in turn, with a vote if songs played are appreciated, or with a game: the one who can answer a quiz question can choose next song).

Maybe in the future we'll see thematic rooms: jazz, rock, experimental, discovery, song with nice lyrics, etc. Or maybe we'll spend some evenings with friends, each one adding nice songs after the other, or playing blind test. We can also imagine party were everybody can participate to the playlist.
If in addition you use it on your phone: you are your own radio disc jockey :)

Following is a video showing the current implementation of the proof of concept, it's in french but quite easy to understand.

For the record: I'll be in Brussels next weekend for the FOSDEM, where I'll make a demo of the project at the XSF stand; don't hesitate to come to have a chat :). In addition I'll have a short talk in the devroom on saturday evening (18:00), you can have more information by clicking on this link.

To play the video, you nead a recent browser (e.g. Firefox 4+ or the last Chromium).
You can also use VLC (>=1.1 only), by using this url as a flux: http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_5_radio_collective.webm

Last but not least, you can use mplayer: mplayer "http://www.goffi.org/videos/pr%c3%a9sentation_S%c3%a0T_5_radio_collective.webm"

This video is licensed under Creative Common BY-SA

Your browser doesn't manage the « video » tag, you should update, e.g. with the last Firefox

Why prebind and attach?

When your web application is already logged in and needs to establish a XMPP connection you have a seamless and secure solution with prebind and attach. You don’t have to ask the user to provide the credentials again, and you don’t have to render the credentials insecure in your HTML output.

Prebind with MatriX

This code shows how to prebind a session with MatriX. On success MatriX raises the OnPrebind event and provides the Jid, Rid and Sid in the PrebindEventArgs. The Rid is the last one used by MatriX and must be incremented before getting passed to Strophe.
You can render this params in a new page and attach the session with Strophe.

var xmppClient = new XmppClient { Username = "testuser", XmppDomain = "ag-software.de", Password = "secret", Transport = Matrix.Net.Transport.BOSH, Uri = new System.Uri("http://ag-software.de/http-bind/") }; // subscribe to the prebind event xmppClient.OnPrebind += client_OnPrebind; void client_OnPrebind(object sender, PrebindEventArgs e) { prebindArgs = e; are.Set(); } // start prebinding with MatriX now xmppClient.Prebind();

You can download a complete ASP .NET example project here:
Bosh Prebind Example

Yay!

Today we are opening our fresh new Jappix Mobile (jappix.mobi) website.

It is dedicated to the future Jappix Mobile smartphone app. For the moment, it suggests the user some good alternatives to our future app (Beem on Android for instance).

Jappix Mobile will first be an Android app. It will feature instant messaging (both private and groupchat), social channel (instant sharing is a strong need on mobile phones) with picture attaching capabilities, and video/audio chatting. Our aim is to replace the whole old phone features which are SMS, MMS and calls. Our vision is that everything should pass through the Internet.

That's why we are looking for great and talented Android developers, who would like to contribute to a new Jappix open-source project! If you are interested, contact us on this page.

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

The dark future of search is being foreshadowed by this Twitter vs. Google fight. The latest Twitter volley at Google is this quote (seen on GigaOm) from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo:

"Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second... They've indexed 3 billion of our pages," Costolo said. "They have all the data they need."

There's no doubt that 1,300 hits per second is a large number, but let's put that in perspective:

• In February 2010, Twitter was at 50 million tweets per day. This is just under 600 tweets per second.
• In June 2011, Twitter was at 200 million tweets per day. This is over 2,300 per second.
• In October 2011, Twitter hit 250 million tweets per day or just under 3,000 per second.
• They have spikes of over 7,000 tweets per second, with the largest (so far) being just over 25,000 tweets per second.

For part of 2010, Google was perhaps able to keep up with the stream at 1,300 requests per second. Somewhere between February and June, the average volume of tweets outpaced them.

Let's assume that they kept pace until June 2011, and that on June 1, Twitter went from somewhere in the range of 1,300 tweets per second to their reported 2,300 tweets per second. Google is 1,000 tweets behind per second.

By the end of the year, Google missed 15.5 billion tweets. They are two months behind if they didn't skip any, and the tweet volume did not increase. But it did increase by 25% or so by October, and surely it has grown more since then.

If Google has only indexed 3 billion pages so far, they have approximately 12 days of tweets at current volume. It's pretty hard to rationalize the 3 billion pages number against the 1,300 per second number. Was Google indexing at a much slower rate before? Did they not start until a few months ago?

Of course Google may be getting multiple tweets per request, perhaps by crawling the timelines of important users. But this means that they probably get a lot of requests that don't give them any new tweets, or else the timeliness of the data is poor.

No matter how you slice it, it appears Google would be unable to keep up. Even if they were keeping up now, Twitter's growth probably sets a time limit for which keeping up remains possible.

Perhaps Google is super clever, and can index only the right tweets. I think that it's more probable they have "enough" data to surface results for the super popular topics, and miss nearly everything in the long tail of the distribution. I expect that this adversely affects search quality, which one suspects is a high priority for the world's best search engine.

Google is no saint. They are just as guilty of the same data hoarding. If you ran these numbers for YouTube indexing, I think you will find the situation is much worse. I imagine that most of these data silo companies purposefully set their crawl rates too low for anyone to achieve high quality search results.

In the case of Twitter, the end result for users is even worse because Twitter's own attempts at search are terrible and are getting worse over time. At least Google makes a decent YouTube search, even if no one else can.

Even if Google could get all the tweets, they still would have very little to no Facebook data. I still think the best strategy in this situation for them is to create their own social data and use that instead. It's a tough road, but they seem to have little choice.

In the end, it's not about Google or Twitter or Facebook, but the stifling of innovation and competition around data. We can only hope that some federated solution or some data-liberal company wins out in the end.

The final 5.1.0 for the Tigase XMPP Server is around the corner. While we are running the last tests you can grab Beta4 build which is most likely the same exact code we will publish as the final new version.....

Please note, the download section has been moved to our project tracking system which hosts all our projects and is based on Redmine.

As usually any comments are very welcomed.

read more

This evening I coverted the information from the xmpp.org web page at http://xmpp.org/resources/public-services/ into a format that will enable us to use XEP-0309 when server software starts to support that protocol. Instead of using WordPress tables at xmpp.org, I now store information about each server in a vCard4 XML file, which is converted into an old-style services.xml file (disco#info format) and into an index.html file using shell scripts and XSLT. You can see the results at http://xmpp.net/.

Already in my career I've experienced enormous passion, burnout, extraordinary dedication to my team and projects, and depression. I'm sure many others have as well. Has it always been this way with technology? I often wonder if this rollercoaster is necessary, healthy, or normal.

I recently saw a recommendation for Soul of a New Machine, which tells the story of a team of engineers at Data General who built a new 32-bit computer in the late 1970s. The book is fascinating. Thirty year later, many of its descriptions of the project and the way the team worked and was treated could apply to any modern project.

The plot summary will no doubt sound familiar to you: A team of mostly young, mostly male engineers works grueling hours to build something amazing in too short an amount of time. They succeed, albeit a bit over their original schedule. Despite the project's commercial success, the team is denied both recognition and financial rewards and many end up leaving the company. Almost all of them ultimately enjoyed it and would (and did) do it again.

There were many pieces of this story that resonated with me.

Work is a Drug

On overworking Tom West, the manager of the team in the book, says:

That's the bear trap, the greatest vice. Your job. You can justify just about any behavior with it. Maybe that's why you do it, so you don't have to deal with all those other problems.

Why deal with the unpredictable world, when the controllable world of creation is available? It's code as escapist drug, and I love to get high on it. Mundane things like cleaning my house, and more serious ones like taking care of my health, are all easy to avoid while fixing bugs or starting a new project.

It's both possible and important to find a balance.

The team's secretary, who was much more than her title suggests, suffered and succeeded with the rest of the team. Even she says:

I would do it again. I would be very grateful to do it again. I think I would take a cut in pay to do it again.

Even as I recover from projects that burned me out, I am constantly thinking about how to do new ones. In fact, while I'm doing any project, I'm already thinking about doing another. This sounds like drugs again. But they are good drugs.

Harassment and Treatment of Women

The book describes how some team members tormented the lone female engineer. This is something that still happens today, and it's terrible. And people then wonder why there are so few women in our industry.

In addition to that, at the end when they hand out the peer awards, their award to the woman was for putting up with them, not for any of her actual accomplishments.

Betty Shanahan was that lone woman, and it looks to me that she deserved more than just an award for thick skin. She's the CEO of the Society of Women Engineers, and she was "a member of the design team for the first parallel processing minicomputer and manager of hardware design for subsequent systems." She later moved to the business side of technology, and I wonder if that had anything to do with her having to put up with the Eagle team's harassment.

How Something is Done is Important Too

Often we judge things by their properties, but one can also rightly judge something by how it is made. Shoes made from child labor are less good than those made in other ways.

Kidder, the book's author, discusses this:

In The Nature of the Gothic John Ruskin decries the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed ony by the equivalent of slave labor. Writing in the nineteeth century, Ruskin was one of the first, with Marx, to have raised this now-familiar complaint. In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions under which it was built.

By this kind of measure, is the work many teams do good? Is the Eagle computer that Tom West's team built really a success since the team worked much overtime, suffered divorces and other problems, and in the end received little to no reward?

I think it's time for entrepreneurs and workers in our industry to demand better. Our outputs will be better if they are made sustainably, and not just by the measure above. In retrospect, maybe the reviewers of LA Noire should have taken into the account the trials of its developers; it certainly would not have fared well.

Freedom of Expression

I want to hire resourceful people. I want to describe a general outline of a design and not have to describe it in intricate detail in order for them to build it.

It turns out that this is critical for happiness. If we're told exactly how to do something, it takes much of the creativity and fun out of the work.

Engineers are supposed to stand among the privileged members of industrial enterprises, but several studies suggest that a fairly large percentage of engineers in America are not content with their jobs. Among the reasons cited are the nature of the jobs themselves and the restrictive way sin which they are managed. Among the terms used to describe their malaise are *declining technical challenge; misutilization; limited freedom of action; tight control of working conditions*.

You must trust those you work with to be resourceful. If you don't trust them, you will end up micromanaging them into unhappiness, and you will also remove their valuable creative input from your product.

There is a balance to be struck with feedback. The Eagle engineers thought that the managers didn't appreciate their efforts, but in reality, some of this was them trying to stay out of the way. Kidder asked the Tom West's boss:

Had the Eagle project always interested him or had it grown in importance gradually?

"From the start it was a very important project."

Was he pleased with the work of the Eclipse group?

"Absolutely!" His voice falls. "They did a hell of a job."

But some members of the team felt that they had been rather neglected by the company.

"That doesn't surprise me," he says. "That's frequently the case. There's often a conflict in people's minds. How much direction do they want?"

I've had this same issue with investors as well. You don't want them to meddle with your company or your product, but you also want their advice and guidance. It's possible to go too far in either direction, but mostly you hear about stories where investors meddle too much. I personally think it's probably better to err on the side of too little help than to end up with too much meddling.

The Venture Capitalists

Even thirty years ago, the VCs had a bad rap. Tom West was asked in a Wired article years after the book's publishing why he stayed at Data General until he retired:

"You could do new products and companies within the company, rather than shag some venture capitalist and kill yourself for five years." To be an entrepreneur, he says, "you have to be interested in networking, even with fools."

This is another reason why I would prefer to bootstrap companies if at all possible.

Tom West ended up working on many interesting projects at Data General, but ultimately, none of them got the support or recognition they deserved. The other members of the Eagle team spread out and started or worked for new companies, and in general seemed much happier.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it's both a fascinating tale of heroism and creativity and a saddening tale of undervalued and underpaid engineers. I am both emboldened to keep following my passions and more mindful of its dangers. My troubles are not unique - not even modern. Thirty years after this book was written, I feel like it could have been written yesterday.

Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence (David Mario Smith / January, 10, 2012) report by leading analyst firm, Gartner, evaluated in 4 use case categories for enterprise IM & presence.

7 critical capabilities like chat, presence, clients, archiving, interoperability and integration, administration and conferencing help to assess the different vendors.

• Study assesses a selection of 9 IM & Presence offerings
• ProcessOne believes study demonstrates the IM market maturity and industry leadership
• Categories include internal collaboration, external collaboration, business process support and customer support

ProcessOne was recently evaluated in the enterprise IM and Presence category in an independent analysis, published on January 10, 2012, by leading industry analyst firm Gartner. This study complements other studies by Gartner such as the MarketScope for Enterprise IM and Presence published on July, 5, 2011.

As more enterprises use real-time messaging to ease collaboration internally and externally between employees and customer relationship, business processes are requiring more flexibility and real-time interaction, especially while employees, applications and connected things are fully mixed together.

A business environment, where all employees are connected through various devices, especially smartphones, is challenging for enterprises. Push notification tends to become extremely important as it enables processes to synchronize with employees again and promote real-time discussion and decision. This is why companies need seamless real-time chat and push interaction and it's great to see the top analyst firm rate and define ProcessOne in this way.

Yay!

Months ago, I announced I was stopping all my Jappix development. Well, I came back on my decision, and I decided now to code a little bit for Jappix itself. But my real motivation is to work hard to add new Jappix.com platform services (Jappix Me is one of them).

I have now the idea to create a Jappix Pro platform, allowing companies and organizations to get commercial Jappix support. Four offers will be proposed:

• Jappix help (EUR 10/resolved problem)
• Jappix full setup (EUR 50)
• Jappix custom setup (EUR 100)
• Jappix development (EUR 30/worked hour)

The last offer will be really interesting, both for companies (they will be able to get their own feature requests to work), developers (they will be able to get paid for their hard work) and community (the code created will be also added to our open project). This is a new ecosystem we really want to be created. It will make the project really go forward, and give us the possibility to make our activity a bit more "professional".

There's just a huge problem to that. We live in France. Well, French laws are not really permissive to this kind of work: we need to declare our revenues, so that it makes lots of papers to do (a looooot of work!). We still need to discuss about the idea before deciding to launch it!

Julien will soon open a developer website on Jappix.org. This website will help people who want to write code for Jappix join us. We know it is hard to get into the project - for the moment. It will be soon available at developer.jappix.org (soon!).

Another announcement is that we goal to release a "perfect" 1.0 version, so that now, every new released version will be 0.9.X. The next Jappix version will be 0.9.1. We still did not decided whether we will give a new codename per sub-release or we will keep Spaco as a single codename.

We also had many internal problems in the project development. I admit I did not listened enough to what others had to say. The reason to that is that I wanted to work fast, do what I had to do and release quickly (I have a life, apart from Jappix, I don't want to spend days and days behind my Mac screen in fact). There is a huge lack of communication, I know. I am part of this problem, that's why I will now give my best to go forward with what others have to say. Sorry for that. Again.

Some of you have noticed we removed the "Source code" tab on our Codingteam.net page, and that it is also unavailable by direct URL access. Don't worry, we don't want to remove any free license. We just have a Google problem which is indexing data that we want to remove. The development code is still available here, but you can also get it by downloading a Jappix package. We are currently working to remove that data on our repository. Then, the tab will be added again!

Let's talk about our growth, we now have:

• About 11,000 registered users on our XMPP server
• Up to 300 logged in users on our XMPP server in peak times
• Up to 250 BOSH sessions in peak times
• About 17,000 Jappix downloads
• About 80 Jappix Me profiles created in last 4 days

More statistics are available here.

By the way, you may also want to know more about our financial situation. Actually it is pretty stable: last summer we though about a small monetization program on our commercial websites (for the moment only on project.jappix.com and mini.jappix.com):

• We currently earn 85$/month (BackLinks.com)
• We get 70$ bonus per hosting client we refer (Arvixe.com)
• We get 100$ bonus per advertiser we refer (BackLinks.com)
• We get about 10$/month (community donations)

We recently renewed our hosting, our TLS certificate and all our domain names for the 2012 year. Remember that all this money is received on PostPro's PayPal account and is only used for Jappix (mostly for hosting, we need about 500$/year for that). We don't withdraw anything for our personal use.

Well, now you know everything. Jappix is going forward, we're giving our best for that project. Remember!


Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Note: now you can read my new blog available on my Jappix Me profile. I post lots of pictures I take, and sometimes some news about Jappix and XMPP. Julien has also his own profile.

For a long time I have heard of I2P and I thought it was a good idea, but never actually tried to install it. Today I installed I2P and I have to say that I'm amazed by it. I was expecting a barely functioning app, very slow response times and crappy ported apps running on top of it. I was wrong.

The I2P router console is simply great. It include many apps, such as its own web, email and BitTorrent servers. I'm not very good at describing stuff, and reading about it's probably too dry. I would recommend anybody to try it first if they are interested. It is like discovering a new internet inside of the internet.

It is true that it lacks a lot of services, and that's why I want to know more about developing apps for I2P.

Hey!

A short news to let you know we just released Jappix Spaco (0.9 version), which integrates Jappix Me support (when registering a new account).
A bunch of little bugs have been fixed, such as the image navigation issue with Safari on MacOS.

Have fun with Spaco!

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Today, 12:00 a.m (Paris hour), we are proud to release Jappix Me, which is a fresh new Jappix.com project with a bunch of amazing features. That's really a huge step forward for social XMPP.

Want a short description of what Jappix Me is? Well, it's a kind of Web gateway of your profile for everyone. It makes your social channel public, your current position public, and your profile/vCard public. You can also use it as an image gallery viewer.

Want to use the same avatar everywhere on the Web (forums, blogs, ...)? Yay! Jappix Me makes it possible, each profile have a page called "Export" to get the links to some part of this profile.

Want to post new updates? You have to use Jappix itself, then it will appear in the next hours on your public profile. The profiles are updated everyday by our bot.

Want to know more about your privacy? Jappix Me is a Jappix.com service, we respect your privacy and we ensure no security leak will remain. You can also set some parts of your profile private, like the social channel or your current position. Your profile can be removed whenever you want to, or you can disallow Google, Bing, ... to index your profile.

Hey, I want to create my profile, now! Well, let's go 



Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Yay!

Tomorrow we will release something a bit special, a new Jappix project. We can tell you this will be awesome, a great innovation for XMPP world a once again we will provide a solution to something really missing for XMPP users.

Tomorrow XMPP will be much more social, we promise you 

Vanaryon, Jappix founder.

Twitter sees Google's latest Google+ feature, integration into Google search, as anti-competitive, and it probably is. However, it brings to the surface some real issues with the future of search and of data.

Twitter's argument:

We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Google's response was:

We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.

People have been digging into the semantics of nofollow (see Danny Sullivan and Luigi Montanez), but there is a much bigger issue.

Google and other established and up-and-coming search engines have no real way to include lots of data in their index. It's easy to imagine that the lack of access to Twitter and Facebook data was a motivator for Google+ in the first place.

Lots of sites now generate enough data that it is unrealistic to crawl them. For example, Youtube has more new content every day than they allow anyone to crawl. Twitter is essentially the same. This means there is no way to index this data without special arrangements with the provider. Twitter has closely guarded their firehose of data, but at least they have some mechanism to obtain it. Youtube, as far as I am aware, has no such mechanism.

My team and I ran into this problem head on trying to build Collecta, a real-time search engine. Access to the data was a primary blocker for many features and product ideas, and over the too short life of that company, access became significantly more difficult, not easier.

Google can build an effective search, even a real-time one, for Youtube, but no one else can. Twitter can build search for their data, but few others can, and their data access policies can and do change on a whim.

If Google believes that microblogging data will improve their search product, then a reasonable strategy to obtain that data is to try and build their own microblogging service to generate it. I can't fault Google for trying. If I thought Collecta could have effectively competed against Twitter for their audience, I would certainly have attempted that as well.

Google, Twitter, Facebook and others are hoarding silos of otherwise public data. Not only is this artificially limiting the features of their products, but it squashes the potential for new and exciting search applications. The search services that have sprung up are limited to your own data, aggregate results from service-specific search APIs, exist at the mercy of data providers, or make do with a tiny subset of the data. I don't think Google could have built their own search engine if the Web were similarly hostile.

One could argue for requiring these bits of data to be openly available, but unlike the data of the past, this data is expensive to publish and consume. Most of these services may not even have a mechanism to publish the data, even internally. Simply receiving the Youtube or Twitter firehoses (and not counting video or image media) would require significant engineering effort, and the rate of data generation is only accelerating.

I think we must push for open access to data, even if it is costly. These data wars benefit very few. If things don't change, the future of search is dark.

The Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network brings Erlang community a complete packaging system and a simple way to manage several installations of Erlang.
CEAN 2.0 comes with Erlang R12B-5, R13B04, R14B04, and R15B, for Linux/Mac/Windows.

More than providing binary packages, now we provide an Erlang development/build/package framework.
This way you can even build any other Erlang version you need and build your own repositories.
The aim is to reach a production quality level repository of auto-generated Erlang packages, using a cross-platform framework.

The most valuable CEAN 2.0 features are:

• Provide both Erlang and Unix shell commands.
• Build and packaging framework is now Open Source (GPL).
• Ability to generate packages and standalone installers.
• Work in cluster environment. It's possible to sync Erlang/CEAN installation on several hosts using just one command.
• Ability to have as many Erlang version installed as needed.
• Reliable package dependencies generator.

See more on CEAN web site (cean.process-one.net).
Please post any issue or feature request on our Ticket Tracker.
Use the forum for any kind of request or help.

MatriX XMPP library for iOS and Android is in Beta status now. Both versions are based on MonoTouch and Mono for Android from Xamarin.

Using this technology you can easily port your existing MatriX based c# XMPP apps to iOS and Android and resuse most of your existing code and business logic.

When you are interested in Beta testing then please contact us.

As you’ll be aware if you’ve been following the XSF’s mailing lists and chatrooms, FOSDEM 2012 is coming, and that means it’s also time for the XMPP Summit 11.

A rough timetable is:

Friday 3rd February – XSF Interop Day (Hosted by Cisco in Diegem)

The testing to be done is being organized as I type on our mailing list at interop@xmpp.org

Saturday 4th February – XMPP Realtime Lounge at FOSDEM, XMPP Talks at FOSDEM

If you’ve some fun project to demo at our stand, the Realtime Lounge, or an exciting talk about XMPP and related topics, we still have speaking slots available – tell us your idea on the summit@xmpp.org mailing list. Talks start at 11:00, and run through to 19:00.

Sunday 5th February – XMPP Realtime Lounge at FOSDEM

More demos of unusual and inventive uses of XMPP throughout the day at the Realtime Lounge.

Monday 6th February – XMPP Summit 11 (Hosted by Cisco at Diegem)

Technical talks and discussion for the participants of the standards@xmpp.org mailing list.

All this, and evening entertainment too – on Friday, there’s the FOSDEM Beer Event (Look for the XSF logo projected onto the ceiling to find us there!), and on Saturday, we’ll have the XSF Dinner – free to XSF Members, and sponsors are always welcome – and very popular on the night!

If you’re coming, join the summit@xmpp.org mailing list and make yourself known – we’re busy organizing hotel deals, speakers, demos, and so on there, so you’ll be able to get the best deals we can wangle and be ahead of the game.

See you all there!