Bart van Bragt Application 2006

My name is Bart van Bragt (BartVB) and I'm applying for the continuance of my JSF membership (and yes, this application is approximately the same as last year :D).

History
My first contact with Jabber was in 2000 when I needed an IM protocol that could pierce the firewall of the company that I was working with. I wasn't able to get it to work reliably and the clients at that time where, well, not that great :) I'm not sure what triggered my interest again somewhere in 2002 or 2003, I was probably fed up with all those people locked into proprietary protocols working off of servers owned by big American companies. In my opinion it's just insane that something as important as IM is controlled by a handful of companies and that there is close to no interoperation between the IM networks. I think it's time that an open and distributed protocol arises for IM. XMPP should be for IM what SMTP is for Email.

Protocols
No protocols yet but I'm looking into two things. One is authentification for websites through Jabber, your Jabber client talks to your browser which enables you to authenticate on sites without having to create a new account and think up new passwords etc for those sites. There are some proposed JEPs for this, I'd like to experiment with those to see how feasible they are in the real world.

The other thing is HTTP polling without polling. It would be very nice if it was trivial to integrate web applications with Jabber. If you want you web application to do two way communication with the Jabber network you'll need either a server+component or a bot that runs on your server 24/7. Most website owners are not allowed (or able) to install such things. Therefore it would be nice if it was possible to receive incoming Jabber messages for this web application through a POST to a script on your website.

Code
I'm involved in the development of phpBB and we are planning on more tightly integrating Jabber with it. But before we can do that we need an easy way to implement two way communication with Jabber servers without bots/components. Most phpBB users are average Joes that want a forum for a couple of people.

Evangelism
Jabber/XMPP is great from a technical and policical point of view. We need to communicate that to the rest of the world. The current Jabber community is mostly focussed on cool new technical projects and not on basic features that your average user wants or needs. Another problem is that there is no attractive 'How to get started with Jabber' site for end-users. I've been planning to create one and I'm going to do that as soon as my schedule permits me to invest some more time in that project :) For the moment I'm still trying to get jabbercentral.com back from a (#@*@#(*& domain hijacker.

Why?
To continue my work within the JSF, to stay on to of things and to be able to influence the future direction of the JSF and Jabber/XMPP as a whole. It would also be nice if I could find the time to stir up some things, the JSF has been _really_ quiet in the last two years.