Last weekend, I participated in an XSF-community organized sprint, in The Hague (conveniently located in my country of residence). Graciously hosted by IPerity, a group of people from various XMPP related projects got together.

Apart from it always being nice to meet up with fellow enthusiasts, we got quite some work done. In the sprint preparation, we had already established that one of the topics that we’d like to address, was the lack of top-notch (mobile) client support, in XMPP world.

Much of the work that we did revolved around adding better support for client notifications. This lead pep. and Laszlo to build a prototype for browser-based push notifications, which they got working in Converse (the web client that Openfire ships in the “inVerse” plugin) and the Prosody XMPP server. A goal for this effort is to evolve into a new XEP for web push.

Yours truly is happy to report that a new plugin was created for Openfire, that adds XEP-0357-defined push notifications to Openfire! The code is still somewhat rough around the edges, but I’d love for people to give this a test run, and how the prototype holds up!

Unrelated to the various notification-related efforts, Erik got quite a bit of work done on a refactoring project in the Gajim client, which over the past weekend is growing to be the basis for a refactoring of Gajim’s chat window UI.

I’m thrilled by the prospect of hosting a major, hopefully Openfire-based, hackathon in the near future, that is geared towards a particular industry in the Netherlands. That might be an exciting precursor for another increase in XMPP utilization! More on that later though!

I’ve had a blast! I loved meeting up with everyone, and enjoyed the discussions we had. Let’s do this again, soon!

*

This article was written and published by Guus der Kinderen for Ignite Realtime.