Dave Cridland Application 2008

I'm still Dave Cridland, and it's time for reapplying for the XSF. Much of this is copied verbatim from my original application, copy edited and updated in places.

Background

I've a rather long background in messaging, dating way back to the ancient and largely forgotten telnet BBS, chat and MUD systems that formed the bulk of what we call instant messaging today, long before ICQ and suchlike happened in the late 90's. I was peripherally involved in some of the work relating to interBBS networking between YAWC based BBSes (and I appreciate this probably means nothing to anyone). Suffice to say that these systems represented one of the earliest instant messaging systems around. (X me to find out more, I should say...)

More recently, I've been involved in roaming configuration systems, like ACAP, and internet messaging, like IMAP and ESMTP. I'm also a tinkerer in some aspects of security, having written one SASL mechanism (HEXA, now abandoned), and been involved in another two.

I have one published RFC (4731) to my name, and a smallish handful of drafts, but I'm primarily an implementor, and protocol designer, rather than a technical author. My name appears in several RFCs in the Acknowledgements section.

Googling for "Dave Cridland" works well, as does, for those with long memories, "Diamond White".

Code

Personal

Polymer, and the IPL, is an example of my code. It does actually contain an XMPP client if you look closely, but I've not worked on this much over the past year - I've merely tidied it up in order to test features in M-Link (see later).

The IMAP client within it still supports more extensions than any other, and still performs very well over very slow links. Server implementors still use it for testing their clients, and average users have still not heard of it.

Work

I have worked at Isode for well over a year now, working mostly within the Internet Messaging Team which produces M-Box (an exceptionally fast IMAP server supporting Lemonade), M-Switch (a very fast MTA supporting Lemonade and X.400, simultaneously), and soon, M-Link (a currently un-benchmarked XMPP server, but it seems pretty quick and scalable so far). I also work on management services, in particular SNMP support, across all of these as well as M-Vault (an exceedingly solid LDAP/X.500 DSA).

Why I like XMPP

After a year of my nefarious involvement, it still seems to work, and work well. There's a considerable amount of flexibility within the protocol, too, and I don't think we're anywhere close to finding any natural limits on what it can do.

I said a year ago that I don't believe XMPP will replace ESMTP for email - and I still think this is a good thing - but I am beginning to feel as if it's safe to say that it will replace HTTP for many tasks, and that's a great thing.

What I've done within the XSF and XMPP community

I'm currently serving on the XMPP Council because, as everyone knows, nobody else wanted to. I'm hoping that you all feel I'm doing a reasonable job, raising issues which need to be raised, etc.

I'm also trying to get people thinking about various issues which have either been forgotten about, or not thought about sufficiently, or simply stalled. Binary data handling was one, and while no new protocols have resulted from this, I'm hoping that the discussion was useful nonetheless.

What you won't have seen as much of is that I've been trying to quietly push XMPP technologies in the IETF, as well.

Other reasons to vote for me

• Voting "Yes" is so much easier than "No".
• It's my birthday this year.
• The voting day has a "y" in it - Fate!

Contact Details

I have: xmpp:dwd@jabber.org (Normal address, and also for IETF/XSF work)

And: xmpp:dwd@dave.cridland.net (Personal Address, running M-Link)

And: mailto:dave@cridland.net (Personal and IETF/XSF work)