I spent the last weekend from Thursday to Sunday in Brussels at the XSF-Summit (here is a very nice post about it by JCBrand) and the FOSDEM. It was really nice to meet all the faces belonging to the JIDs you otherwise only see in the MUCs or on GitHub in real life.

There was a lot of discussion about how to make XMPP more accessible to the masses and one point that came up was to pay more attention to XMPP libraries, as they are often somewhat of a gateway for new developers who discovered the XMPP protocol. A good library with good documentation can help those new developers immensely to get started with XMPP.

During my stay and while on the train, I found some time to work on Smack again and so I added support for 3 more XEPs:

Ge0rG gave a talk about what’s currently wrong with the XMPP protocol.  One suggested improvement was to rely more on Stable and Unique Stanza IDs to improve message identification in various use-cases, so I quickly implemented XEP-0359.

XEP-0372: References is one dependency of XEP-0385: Stateless Inline Media Sharing, which I’m planning to implement next, so the boring lengthy train ride was spent adding support for XEP-0372.

A very nice XEP to implement was XEP-0392: Consistent Color Generation, which is used to generate consistent colors for usernames across different clients. I really like the accessibility aspect of that XEP, as it provides methods to generate colors easily distinguishable by users with color vision deficiency.

I hope my contributions will draw one or two developers who seak to implement a chat client themselves to the awesome XMPP protocol 🙂

Happy Hacking!