News from Mar 06, 2006

Jabber.org adopts ejabberd, supported by Process-one

Jabber.org chooses ejabberd instant messaging server, and gets support from Process-one, specialist of high-performance messaging solutions.

What is Jabber.org ?

Jabber is an instant messaging standard, defined by the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) and standardized as eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Jabber.org is both the reference website regarding Jabber, its extensions and its implementation and one of the most visible Jabber-based public instant messaging server.
Jabber.org is probably the most famous Jabber server as it was historically the first in operation.

Powered by ejabberd

In February 2006, Jabber.org has upgraded to ejabberd. Switching to this software is an important decision for the Jabber.org admin team. The Jabber.org server currently has more than 185 000 registered users and regularly gathers over 10 000 simultaneous users. It also has nearly 2 000 connections to other jabber servers.
For ejabberd and Process-one, this decision is a recognition of ejabberd's scalability, robustness and broad feature sets. As a result of this migration, the Process-one and Jabber.org teams will collaborate to improve the ejabberd software.
This fact will boost ejabberd's development speed and will accelerate adoption for large scale Jabber deployments.

About ejabberd

ejabberd is a full-featured, highly-scalable and rock-solid XMPP server. Distributed under an Open Source license, the server currently powers many of the largest Jabber deployments in the world, accounting for several millions of registered users.

ejabberd is renowned for its cluster support which leads to unmatched features:

A single domain can be served by a cluster of ejabberd nodes
Fault-tolerance: Server can keep on running, even if several nodes in the cluster fail.
Scalability: Cluster nodes can be added or removed on the fly, without stopping the servers.

For more informations, please visit:
http://www.process-one.net/en/projects/ejabberd/index.html

Community web site: http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/

About Process-one

Process-one is a company specialized in high-performance messaging solutions. The company is actively developing the ejabberd server and offers a strong commercial supports for ejabberd installations around the world. Process-one is thus one of the major messaging solution providers.

For more informations, please visit:
http://www.process-one.net/

Contact: contact@process-one.net

About Jabber, XMPP, and the Jabber Software Foundation

The Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) is a non-profit organization that builds open application protocols on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Widely considered the lingua franca of instant messaging, XMPP is an Internet standard for presence, real-time messaging, and streaming XML that grew out of the popular Jabber open-source technologies first released in 1999. With approval of XMPP by the IETF in 2004, the JSF continues to develop XMPP extensions that meet the needs of its many stakeholders: open-source and commercial developers (including Apple, HP, Oracle, and Sun), organizations large and small (including the U.S. defense establishment and most Wall Street investment banks), Internet and mobile service providers (including Google and Orange), and over 20 million end users worldwide.

Interview with Peter Saint-Andre, Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation

When has the Jabber.org server been launched ?

Originally in 1999 (I think August). The jabber.org server was the first Jabber server on the Internet and has always been considered the most prominent Jabber server on the network (the "center of the federation"). That's one reason why we have more server-to-server connections than any other server.

How many different implementations have been used to run Jabber.org ?

The jabber.org server has always used the jabberd 1.x (before that jabberd 0.x) codebase. Several years ago we deployed connection manager software from Jabber Inc. to manage the large number of client and server connections we receive at the jabber.org server, but we still used the jabberd 1.x codebase for the core router.

Why has the Jabber.org team decided to switch to ejabberd ?

We needed to switch from our older setup, which had some fairly serious stability issues. There were three possible solutions:

1. Run a commercial, proprietary server such as Jabber XCP. This was unacceptable for political reasons (i.e, the jabber.org server should be running open-source).

2. Sponsor someone to write a scalable connection manager for jabberd 1.x. We didn't really consider this.

3. Use an open-source server that could meet our scalability needs. From our knowledge of existing large deployments (e.g., gizmoproject.com and mxit.co.za) as well as test results posted on the Internet, that meant ejabberd.

The JSF is committed to using open-source software whenever possible, so switching to ejabberd was a natural move for us.

What is Jabber.org expecting from the migration to ejabberd ?

Improved stability, full XMPP compliance, support for a wider range of XMPP extensions (e.g., pubsub), and a more frequently maintained codebase.