This is a summary of last year's most notable events related to ejabberd, a free and open source distributed fault-tolerant Jabber/XMPP server in Erlang.

General News

• Two ejabberd releases (1.1.0 in April and 1.1.2 in September) provided not only improvements and bugfixes, but also brand new features like Ad-Hoc Commands, SASL Anonymous, Stream Compression, chatroom logging to HTML, support for the MySQL and MSSQL databases, and so forth.
• SMP support and improved kernel poll support are the main highlights in this year's Erlang/OTP releases. Both improvements benefit ejabberd's scalability and performance.
• Jabber.org migrated to ejabberd in February.
• The GMX brand of the listed United Internet AG international Internet Service Provider uses ejabberd as a backend for its instant messaging service.
• Process-one hosts a Subversion repository devoted to ejabberd contributions (Tutorial).
• CEAN, the Comprehensive Erlang Archive Network, has put version 1.0 beta online. CEAN aims to become a large central multiplatform repository of Erlang based software packages. It supersedes similar projects like erlmerge, REPOS and erlrt. Check the CEAN presentation at EUC06 for more details.
• Alexey Shchepin won the Erlang User of the Year 2006 award for his work on ejabberd.
• ejabberd's 4th birthday in November. Jabber became eight years old at the end of 2006.

New Contributions

Many new contributions were published:

• Several external authentication scripts
• Support for authentication via Active Directory, vCard and shared roster
• HTTP Binding support
• Access MUC chatrooms with an IRC client
• Dump users' information to an HTML file
• Allow Flash clients
• SSL secured LDAP support
• Message Archiving support
• Module to log user messages to Mnesia (and also one to XML file).
• Log chat messages in text files (HTML logging was included in ejabberd 1.1.0).
• Password recovery using an external email account
• Presence on the web
• SOCKS5 Bytestreams support for file transfer A different implementation of the same protocol was included in the development version of ejabberd.
• SMS transport
• Embed Yaws HTTP server
• S2S proxying

The credits page aims to list all the people that contributed to ejabberd.

New Tutorials

Several new tutorials were published in English last year:

• Anonymous users support
• Using ejabberd with MySQL native driver
• Using ejabberd with Microsoft SQL Server
• Install Datasink for Message Archiving
• Install MUCkl - Multi-User Chat Web Frontend
• Migrate from WPJabber to ejabberd
• Fault-tolerant XMPP Environment Using Cisco Server Load Balancing
• Video tutorial: Setting up a Enterprise Instant Messaging server in 180 seconds
• Installing the ejabberd XMPP server on Gentoo

Moreover, tutorials in other languages also appeared:

• Mac OS Xをインスタントメッセージングサーバーにしよう: although Japanese might look cryptic, the screenshots are still helpful.
• Ejabberd sur Ubuntu: a French language tutorial about installing ejabberd on Ubuntu.

Jabber/XMPP Events

And finally, a list with general Jabber/XMPP news:

• Several Jabber-related projects participated in the Google Summer of Code 2006, including one based on ejabberd.
• New releases of Jabber clients include Chatopus 2.01-2.15, Coccinella 0.95.12 - 0.95.15, Freetalk 0.69 (stable) and 1.90 (unstable with Jingle support), Gajim 0.11, GOIM 1.10, Google Talk 1.0.0.92-1.0.0.100, Gossip 0.10-0.20, Jabber Mix Client 0.6-1.1, Jeti 0.7.3-0.7.5, Kopete 0.12.x, Tkabber 0.9.9, and Spark.
• New clients: GoTalkMobile, Jabbin (based on Psi), Landell (based on the Tapioca framework), LiveJabber (Ajax), MGtalk, Jabberworld.org Webchat, and Web Jabber.
• New releases of open source servers include DJabberd 0.80 and 0.81. jabberd14 has been resurrected with the 1.6.0 release. Also jabberd2 is alive again with a 2.1 release. Finally, several versions of the Java servers Tigase and Wildfire have been released, besides their new websites; Tigase is using Drupal like ejabberd.
• New releases of components include Idavoll 0.5.0, PyMSNt 0.11.x, PyAIMt 0.7x-0.8, PyICQt 0.7x-0.8, Jabber RSS Service 0.4.x, Jabber Mail Component 0.1.4-0.2.3, PyMXitt 0.1, PyMailt 0.2, jGGtrans 2.2.2, and MUCkl.
• Tsung 1.2.1 has been released. Tsung is a high-performance benchmark tool and framework that can be used to benchmark XMPP servers.
• New Jabber/XMPP related websites: The XMPP Federation, XMPP.org, and IM Federation.
• There was an XMPP interoperability testing event in July. Alexey Shchepin and Mickaël Rémond attended the event in representation of ejabberd. Photo's can be found here, here, and here.
• On May 19 there was The Open Discussion Day.
• On the less bright side of life, Peter Millard, a longtime contributor to the Jabber community, died in April.