Jabber Australia

Jabber Australia is a small group of Jabber enthusiasts looking to promote the use of the Jabber Instant Messaging network to the citizens of the greatest nation in the world. Although central operations run from Melbourne, we hail from all around Australia and New Zealand.

We will be using our varied IT experience to bring Australia the benefits of communicating with Jabber, and cultivating a community around it.

Jabber is a real-time, distributed, XML-based messaging system. Does that sound complicated? Don't worry, it isn't. Jabber performs basically the same function as the MSN Messenger or AOL Instant Messenger programs, with a few key differences.

Jabber isn't a single program. Jabber is a service running on hundreds of servers on the internet. You connect to the Jabber network using a program on your computer, called a Jabber client. The Jabber client connects to one Jabber server, which then broadcasts your presence to all your friends connected to other Jabber servers around the world. If one Jabber server goes off the air, no other servers are affected. The diagram on the right shows a number of Jabber servers all connected, some with users logged into them. Note that there is no central server controlling the network, so there is no chance that the entire network will die at once (unlike other IM services).

Jabber has a number of plugins (known as transports or gateways) available to extend the protocol. Because of these transports, the Jabber network is able to connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo and many more!

Jabber is open. The method of communication is very well documented, and useful enhancements are always being considered to extend the network's abilities Jabber communicates by sending XML, which is kind of like the HTML that web pages are made out of. Because of the open nature of the network and protocols, no-one can lock you out of the Jabber network. If a particular server doesn't allow public signups, simply sign up with another.

Businesses needing secure messaging should also look to Jabber. It's impossible to achieve security in Instant Messaging if all messages go halfway around the world, to a server controlled by a foreign corporation. Consider getting your IT department to install a Jabber server on your company's Local Area Network. All your employees can securely discuss work without worrying if your company's secrets are being intercepted on the way to the messaging server and back. If you do not wish to connect to the wider Jabber network, simply block port 5269 at your corporate firewall.

This website is running on the Linux operating system, using Apache web server software. Site design is by Tony Collins, with content contributed by members of Jabber Australia. We gratefully recognise and thank both the KDE project and Carles Carbonell Bernado for much of the excellent artwork used at this site. Last though not least, we are running ejabberd as our Jabber server.