Re: [ANN] Prosody XMPP Server Announcement

["Matthew Wild" <mwild1@...>]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 2:37 AM, Javier Guerra Giraldez
<javier@guerrag.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 December 2008, Matthew Wild wrote:
>> Prosody is an exciting new XMPP server written in Lua. It aims to be
>
> it would help if you tell us what XMPP is....
>

My apologies. It's sometimes easy to forget that a lot of people still
have not heard of XMPP, or even Jabber. Though that is thankfully
changing rapidly :)

The name of the protocol changed from Jabber to XMPP some years ago
when it was standardised by the IETF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
Jabber is still the term most widely used though, to refer to the
network as a whole, etc.

Servers currently exist in C/C++, erlang, perl, ruby, Java, etc. None
of them are quite as flexible as we envisioned a Lua one (and there
were plenty saying that Lua wasn't up to the task, especially since it
is "only good for games" :) ). I'm hoping we're in the process of
proving them very much wrong.

Prosody also brings up the extending vs embedding debate... we are
running with the plain Lua executable, and using or writing modules
for adding functionality that is easier to not use Lua for (this
includes hashing, encoding libraries, and expat for parsing the XML
stream, etc.). It's working out nicely indeed.

I'm also extremely grateful to the guy who worked on the luadch
project... the socket framework he wrote there was just what we needed
(copas refused to work with LuaSec). We'd be a lot further behind
today if we hadn't been able to start out with that.

Matthew.