O'Reilly Community

Beautiful (XMPP) Testing

November 02 2009

O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as… read more

The Watch

September 04 2009

Although I remember being interested in Swiss clocks and watches when I was a kid, my attention seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch. Only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because… read more

“XMPP: The Definitive Guide” Code Examples

July 13 2009

Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an… read more

Integrating DocBook with WordPress

July 08 2009

I added a DocBook XSL customization layer to my DocBook Kit that outputs an HTML/PHP version of the document that automatically integrates with a WordPress blog. The stylesheet also (optionally) adds a link to the downloadable PDF of the document. An example document integrating with this blog can be seen… read more

Migrating from Openfire to Prosody

July 03 2009

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

Integrating DocBook with WordPress

June 27 2009

I added a DocBook XSL customization layer to my DocBook Kit that outputs an HTML/PHP version of the document that automatically integrates with a WordPress blog. The stylesheet also (optionally) adds a link to the downloadable PDF of the document. An example document integrating with this blog can be seen… read more

“Beautiful Testing” XMPP Chapter

May 03 2009

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… read more

We’re writing an XMPP book

April 29 2009

I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O’Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a… read more

Kick-starting a DocBook project

April 29 2009

When I started writing “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”, I switched from LaTeX to DocBook as my writing tool, mainly because DocBook was O’Reilly’s suggested format. After a few months of writing DocBook documents, I started getting quite attached to the format: not only does it force you to separate presentation… read more

XMPP 101 @ FOSDEM

March 04 2009

The slides of the “XMPP 101” talk that Peter and I gave at FOSDEM are now available on SlideShare. This presentation gives a fast-paced introduction to XMPP, and is mostly based on “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”. If all goes well, we will be giving a more extended version of this… read more

Swift Messaging

March 03 2009

I’m excited to announce a new player in the Jabber/XMPP game: Swift. Shortly after finishing the XMPP book, I started working on Swift, a pragmatic, cross-platform, user-friendly IM client. Together with Kevin Smith, we are building this project from the ground up, driving its development using agile methodologies. Underneath the… read more

We have an animal

February 08 2009

O’Reilly just sent us the cover for our upcoming XMPP Book, and it seems we got the world’s smallest ungulate: the lesser mouse-deer. I haven’t seen one in real life before, am not sure I ever want to, but still: great! Have a look below to see what the cover… read more

Final revision of the XMPP book submitted

February 02 2009

After a few weeks of heavy labour and long nights, Peter, Kevin, and I just submitted the final revision of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide” to the folks at O’Reilly. All the feedback from our (thorough) reviewers has been processed, we added quite a few extra bits and clarifications (58 pages… read more

Mirroring GMail locally with MBSync

December 11 2008

Ever since I started using GMail as my mail client, I wanted to have an automatically synchronized local (off-line) copy of my GMail account. Such a copy would not only serve as a backup, but would also come in handy when I needed to consult messages when I’m without internet… read more

Rough cuts of XMPP book now available

December 10 2008

While we are working very hard to finish the first draft of our upcoming book ‘XMPP: The Definitive Guide’, O’Reilly has recently released early versions of most of the chapters of the book as Rough Cuts. People interested in learning about XMPP today can now get a preliminary version of… read more