You’ll already have read, or be about to read, similar blog posts from Remko and Peter, I imagine, here’s my take:

Remko Tronçon, Peter Saint-Andre and I are writing a book on XMPP for O’Reilly, with a working title of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”, expected to hit the shelves (and hopefully fly off them soon after) early 2009.

If you’re wondering how things like this come about, the story goes something like this:

Every so often, someone comes into the Jabber Development room, and asks if there’s any getting started documentation, or they ask if there’s a decent book, or they ask if there’s a guide to what Jabber/XMPP can do for them as a developer. For some reason, it seems to usually be me that ends up letting them know that there isn’t really, unless you want to go and read the RFCs, or the XEPs. I got the daft idea that writing such a book would be helpful, so I poked Remko and asked if he was interested in co-authoring something if O’Reilly would publish it – he was, so off we went and did very little for quite a while. As it happens, O’Reilly were interested in publishing a book about XMPP; realising an XMPP book wasn’t an XMPP book without Peter, we set about persuading him that joining us in the venture was a Smart Thing™, and things started moving.

We met up for a pizza at FOSDEM in February, hashed out where we wanted to go with the book, wrote out the overview, sent it off to O’Reilly, who didn’t hate it, and started writing.

Since then, we’ve made some decent progress on it, and also found out that writing books is hard work (even given that each of us has written at least either a doctoral thesis or RFCs). Still, we’re chugging along and things should be really taking shape in the next month or two
The rest will, someday, be history — we’ll post an update later when we’re closer to the inevitable fame and fortune.

Categories: Jabber
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Say hello to Psi 0.12. Thanks to everyone involved in this or previous releases.

New in 0.12
– Multi-user chat windows now join one on one chat windows and can be opened in tabbed form, either sharing a window, or seperately.
– The roster search has been updated, and now triggers a filter when typing into the roster window.
– An XML ringbuffer is now used, allowing access to already received XML in the XML console.
– When resolving a name for new contacts, the full name is now used if the nick name is missing from the vcard.
– Auto-connect on wake is now an independent option.
– MUCs can now be bookmarked, and auto-joined.
– The old config.xml file has been dropped in favour of the new options.xml format – all options in Psi can now be configured from the Advanced options pane (no more hand-editing of config files is required).
– Vcard avatars are now transmitted for the benefit of legacy clients and servers not supporting PEP.
– A new diagnostics group is available in the help menu, to allow debugging problems with the QCA security layer.
– Launching several instances of the same profile on Windows and Unices with DBUS now behaves more sensibly.
– On X11, the taskbar should now flash on new messages for compliant window managers.

Downloads from http://psi-im.org/download/

Categories: Jabber, Psi
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