Psi Team Blog

Because Openfire has been hogging too much of my limited el-tramo.be server resources lately, and because I don’t need a beast of an XMPP server for only 2 users, I decided to replace it by the lightweight Prosody. The migration went flawless, with the help of two tools: Sleek Migrate, and a Prosody XEP-0227 Importer.

First of all, I used Sleek Migrate to retrieve the roster (and other) data from the server, and store it in the standard XEP-0227 format. I extended the tool a bit such that it supports Openfire’s User Import/Export format, a format generated by an Openfire plugin that is distributed with the server software by default. Using this format as input for Sleek Migrate avoids the need to create a user file manually. The changes I made to Sleek Migrate are currently available from my Git repository, awaiting to be pushed to the main repository.

I then wrote a short script that populates the Prosody data dir with the server data from the XEP-0227 XML file. Currently, the script only generates roster and account data, but adding vCard and Private XML Storage (used amongst others to store MUC bookmarks) should not be very hard. Until Prosody creates a native XEP-0227 importer, you can get the script from my Git repository.

Psi 0.13-rc2 is here!  Notably, voice calling is now a standard feature of the Windows version.  Please download and test.

Final on July 13th if no showstoppers are found.

New in 0.13
- Voice calls (Jingle RTP).
- Basic XMPP URI handler.
- Ability to permanantly trust certificates at connect time.
- Mini command system (Ctrl+7 in chat window).
- Various bugfixes.

If you are building from source (e.g. on Linux) and want voice calls, you will need to obtain the PsiMedia plugin separately.  On Linux, the plugin file is called libgstprovider.so, and must be put in Psi’s $LIBDIR/psi/plugins directory.  You’ll know it worked if “About GStreamer” appears in the Help menu.

Psi 0.13-rc1 is here!  Please download and test.

Final on June 6th if no showstoppers are found.

New in 0.13
- Voice calls for Mac OS X and Linux (Jingle RTP).
- Basic XMPP URI handler.
- Ability to permanantly trust certificates at connect time.
- Mini command system (Ctrl+7 in chat window).
- Various bugfixes.

If you are building from source (e.g. on Linux) and want voice calls, you will need to obtain the PsiMedia plugin separately.  On Linux, the plugin file is called libgstprovider.so, and must be put in Psi’s $LIBDIR/psi/plugins directory.  You’ll know it worked if “About GStreamer” appears in the Help menu.

Adam Goucher and Tim Riley (Director of QA at Mozilla) announced a few months ago that they are putting together a Beautiful Testing book for O’Reilly. I took the opportunity to write a chapter about testing in the context of XMPP (more specifically, about testing protocol implementations in Swift), and just submitted the final draft for technical review. The book is expected to be released this August.

Although there are many types of testing being done in the XMPP world, the chapter focuses on the beauty of testing the functionality of XMPP protocol implementations. After a brief introduction on XMPP, it starts out with a description of unit testing simple IQ request/response protocols, and then gradually moves on to higher-level testing of more complex, multi-stage protocols such as session initialization. As you might expect from a developer like me, the chapter is quite heavy on the (C++) code, but I’m told it compensates for the rest of the book

As with all other books in the O’Reilly “Beautiful” series (which started with Beautiful Code, but has since been followed up by Beautiful Architecture, Beautiful Teams, Beautiful Security, and Beautiful Data), all proceeds of the book go to charity, in this case “Nothing But Nets” (which provides mosquito netting to malaria infested areas of Africa). This means that I can plug this book as much as I want, and still have the feeling I’m actually doing a noble, unselfish thing. (contrary to when I casually mention that you can buy our book XMPP: The Definitive Guide at very sharp prices these days). Some time after the book’s release this summer, I will even make a free version of the chapter available here, so check back soon!