Even Apple Uses XMPP

January 13, 2010

Ralph Meijer recently informed me that a few of his projects were shipping with Apple’s OS X and OS X Server products. It turns out that Apple keeps a rather detailed list of the open source and free software projects that are used by various parts of their tools.

Here are the XMPP-related projects on the list:

• Twisted Words, the IM protocol parts of the Twisted framework, which include XMPP support
• Wokkel, the next-generation XMPP support for Twisted and my favorite way to hack XMPP in Python
• Idavoll, the Twisted and Wokkel based XMPP pubsub server (used by Apple’s NotificationServer)
• jabberd2, a well known XMPP server (used by Apple’s ChatServer
• xmpp4r, the Ruby XMPP library (included as part of RubyOnRails)

Some of these seem to be included only with OS X Server or the developer tools, but it’s great to see Apple shipping so much XMPP software in their stack. Apple also has plenty of proprietary XMPP tools as well. For example, iChat is a fairly capable XMPP client.

Let’s hope the trend continues!