Presentation about XMPP4R ruby gem, which was taken during the Kerala Ruby User Group Meetup. The idea was to invite more developers into the project maintenance and development.

1. XMPP4R
XMPP/Jabber library for Ruby
Harisankar P S
@coder_hsps
http://xmpp4r.github.io
http://github.com/xmpp4r/xmpp4r

2. XMPP
● Exchange Message and Presence Protocol used in
communications
● Its a collection of standards that specify how a near
real time communication system can be build
● Its an open standard
● Popular companies that provide xmpp services are
google, facebook, microsoft, AOL, CISCO (they
own Jabber Inc.)

3. ● Thus you can use it to build network and cross
network chat system
● You can use it to build a notification system for your
site, which is accessible even outside your site.
● You can use it to build twitter :)

4. My experience with XMPP
One day a client of ours asked us, can we
build a chat system for his CRM.
● I said yes, it sounds simple. I can build one
using web sockets.

5. Then he asked ”can you build it using Jabber so that
I can add my clients directly into it rather than make
them register again”.
● Jabber. Hmm, I have never used them, but I have
heard about them. It might be possible, but let me do
a bit of research and get back to you.

6. I went to google
And it said?

7. ● There is Jabber4R
– Last released August 14, 2005
● There is XMPP4r
– Last released July 15, 2009
● Bunch of gems that implemented parts of the
protocol were rubybosh, bosh4r, etc but not the
entire protocol
– Well what I wanted was BOSH as well.

8. I asked other Ruby Developers how they
worked with jabber, and there response
was like....

9. Jabber!!! Not again...

10. ● Better not use jabber its hard to work with.
● Almost all responded. We used, xmpp4r, but it
doesn't work much any more. So we hacked what
we wanted.
● Not a complete solution, we just used what we could
get.

11. Well hearing all this I decide to build a solution, of
our own. (Reinvent the wheel)

12. ● But as I started it made me realize
I have this problem, people before me had this
problem and people after will continue to have
these problems.
Why not fix it for everyone!!!.

13. History of XMPP4R
● Initial release was in early 2005
● It implemented the standard, and did nothing more
than what the standard demanded
● Despite being unmaintained, all the things it did do.
It did them well.
● Original author: Lucas Nussbaum

14. So what we did?
● Started to update xmpp4r.
● Got in touch with Lucas, who transferred the
ownership of the gem at rubygems to me
● Created a new website
● updated the readme and documentation
● Started looking around at various forks of xmpp4r.
– Every forked tried to fix one part of the system
– Those we felt were good fixes, we asked them to
send a pull request
– Asked them if they could help updating the original
gem :)

15. RoadMap XMPP4R
● Update the test Spec (Make Travis Green)
● Update the gem to work well with ruby 1.9 and 2.0
● Initial support for ruby 2.1 (not a priority)
● Update the examples
Expected release of the next major release by, End of October, 2013

16. Point of the presentation?
● So the idea I which to share is, rather than releasing
new gems, restarting old un-maintained projects is
also a form of contribution to opensource so:
– Take up old unmaintained open source projects
– Because in opensource no projects are really dead.
– And if are interested, fork and start contributing to
xmpp4r :)

17. Thank you