OpenBand

I feel confident declaring that everyone reading this post has at least seen an instant messaging client. From the early days of talking between terminals in command-line operating systems to the explosion of IM communication on services like AOL Instant Messenger, computer users have discovered and embraced the convenience and power of this electronic communication powerhouse.

As IM was becoming massively popular, the company Jabber in 1999 entered a protocol and client into the ring and began to gain momentum. The Jabber protocol is now widely known as XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), is open source, and is based on eXtensible Markup Language applications. It has been widely adopted by services like Google’s Google Talk and Sun Microsystems’ Sun Java Communications Suite. A major benefit to the use of XMPP as an IM protocol is the ease with which it integrates into e-mail and SMS messages.

One of our senior developers, Darren Ferguson (and here), will be talking about Openband’s XMPP Framework contributions to the Drupal CMS at DrupalCon DC in half-hour discussion titled “Drupal with XMPP integration.” He’ll discuss how he took the lead with the project for Openband and, starting from the existing but degraded Jabber module in Drupal 4.7, extended the module’s capabilities and ended up with XMPPClient and XMPP Framework, the full-service suite which provides XMPP server integration, multi-user chat, user-to-user chat, friend lists, log saving, and real-time language translation.