dekstop: weblog

I previously mentioned the all-Ruby Jabber server xmppd, a new project that is going to be really interesting once it's above a certain basic threshold -- a core goal of this project is to get to a stage where you simply start a script to get the server running, with minimum configuration and no root privileges required. As I'm a fan of such low-barrier-to-entry, low-dependencies software (cf. SQLite) I'm tingling with anticipation.

I just found that a similar project has recently been launched in the Perl space, initiated by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal and Flickr fame. This project is called "DJabberd", and if you search for it now you'll only find the initial announcement on Brad's blog (posted yesterday), and a couple of changelogs in DJabberd's CVS repository.

Quote Brad:

Before I started working on it, Artur and I looked into ejabberd, jabberd2, and some other things. They're just not extensible enough. We started to add pluggable roster management to them, but it was getting painful.

One day Artur comes in and says, "Dude, why don't we write our own?" I started to reply that it'd be hard, but I stopped myself and was like, "oh, right... just an event loop that feeds incoming data to a SAX parser..."

DJabberd is at a similar stage as xmppd, in that its developers recommend to wait before you start using their code; but it seems Jabber is finally getting the clean and easy-to-use server implementations it deserves.

I believe that a year from now Jabber will be in a completely different place than today; this feels just like when Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross first released their Phoenix browser. And the "established" world of Jabber/XMPP developers will then be scratching their heads over why suddenly everybody is excited about the same thing that they've been doing and preaching for years.