Abstract

Jabber aka XMPP is the most popular communication protocol in Lanceville.

Clients

There are innumberable clients out there. For the desktop, we recommend:

• Pidgin
• Gajim

For Android:

• Beem
• Xabber

For some cases, e.g. browsing Jabber XEPs, I prefer to use a command line tool. The tool I use is called Profanity.

Servers

In order to use Jabber you have to register an account at a public Jabber/XMPP server. Since anybody may set up a XMPP server, it is important to choose it carefully. There are many outdated servers out there. Luckily, IM Observatory provides a service to test the security of a server.

XEP – XMPP Extension Protocol

The XMPP protocol itself is very simple. To extend the functionality, XEPs must be activated on the server.

Message Archiving

If one is using Jabber on several devices the chat history might get splitted or lost. To prevent this, the chat history can be saved on the server. There are two different XEPs that provide that can be used for message archiving. Unfortunately I could not find a public server that provides any of these two XEPs yet:

XEP-0136: Message Archiving

Adds a lot of functionalities that are not really needed for message archiving. That’s why it is considered to be over-engineered, hence too complex

XEP-0313: Message Archive Management (MAM)

A newer, simpler implementation.

Further reading:
– Let’s talk XMPP – episode 3 – core and extensions (part 2)
– The (Sad) State of Mobile XMPP in 2014