While we are waiting for infiniti to respond to the questions now would be a good time to harass another high profile jabberite.
This week's guest is Aleksey Shchepin, author of tkabber and ejabberd. He is an extremely active member of the JSF. His software has amassed an almost cult-like following which happens to include me.
Now is the time to release those bottled up questions. Post your questions here and I will gather them up and send them off in a week.
Disclaimer: I am not acting on behalf of the JSF nor is there any guarantee that the interview will appear on jabber.org
note: all comments are moderated, which means that if you are not trying to post spam, it will eventually show up.
Why did you choose to use Erlang for ejabberd?
How do you maintain your productivity?
What is the right spelling: “Aleksey” or “Alexey”? And what is the history behind this different spellings?
What are the next features ejabberd will have in the near future? Is virtual hosting planned for anytime soon?
Is the ejabberd/tkabber developement sponsored in any way?
Justin: I’m not english native speaker, so I probably made a lot of mistakes. The only intentional is the ‘peoples can add comments’.
General
- Why did you start Tkabber/ejabberd project? Personal, academic, job?
- What public do you target with Tkabber/ejabberd: jabberites, geeks, nerds, little business, big business, yourself, nobody, somebody else?
- Are Tkabber and ejabberd your first non-trivial projects?
- How much time did you work in Tkabber/ejabberd before releasing the first version on JabberStudio or CVS?
- What development environment do you use to code Tkabber/ejabberd? And for debugging? [Eclipse, plain editors/emacs/vim, ...]
- What are your favorite programming languages?
- Just curiosity: what client did you use until Tkabber was mature enought?
- More personal questions: Where do you live? And work? And study? Any hobby?
- Did you know Sergei Golovan (big contributor in Tkabber/ejabberd) or Anastasia Gornostaeva (jabber.ru hosting and administration) before starting those projects?
Erlang
- Most people know Erlang exists after reading ejabberd specs. Who introduced you to Erlang?
- Some key features in ejabberd come as Erlang/OTP inheritance. Did you start ejabberd because Erlang/OTP existed? If Erlang/OTP wasn’t available on that time, would you try with other language? Which one?
- Tkabber in the imperative Tcl/Tk, ejabberd in the functional Erlang. Does the shift to functional paradigm help you regarding coding speed, debugging or maintance?
- If you saw the classic Erlang, the movie when considering Erlang/OTP for ejabberd: did it help or prevent you from using Erlang/OTP? Do you agree to appear writting ‘Hey Joe!’ on a remake where analogic telephony is replaced by XMPP?
ejabberd
- What does Tkabber/ejabberd lack to reach version 1.0?
- What features would you like to see implemented in Tkabber/ejabberd but you don’t have time/knowledge/interest in coding yourself?
- Peter Millard is considering software changes in the Jabber Software Foundation public Jabber server. For ejabberd consideration there was some lacking features. What’s the situation now: is ejabberd still in consideration, will you try to fulfill his requirements, will he aleviate some of them…?
- How will you handle ejabberd if it starts receiving patches and new modules with increasing frequency? That could happen if bigger players get interested in it, and will happen for sure as ejabberd grows.
- What’s the relation between Proccess One and ejabberd?
- There are several commercial products that include privative Jabber server and client. In Free and Open Software, money is usually generated offering additional services. How long do you think will it take until a company starts offering commercial support, payed customization and enhancements based on Free Software servers like ejabberd? Has anybody expressed interest about that possibility?
Jabber
+ When, how, and why did you first get involved in Jabber?
- In October 2002 you submitted to Tkabber CVS a plugin called MUTE.
One month later you submitted Fewer specs, more code!?
- You were candidate for the Jabber Council in July 2003, and were
highly rejected (yes: 13; no: 48).
Do you think the mistake when you wrote ‘peoples can add comments’ in your candidature has anything to do? If no, do you have any clue on the real reasons? If you get more free time on the future, will you present again for this or any other position in the Jabber Software Foundation?
- Several key Jabber projects lost their lead programmer lately (Psi, Jabberd2, Gabber), without counting a lot of little bulbs. Is your current payed job/incomings guaranteed for the next decade? Is there anything we can do to keep you motivated?
- Is there anything you’d like to say about the end-of-2004-crisis about Jabber acceptance on the desktop? The biggest public Jabber server is jabber.org, and has ‘only’ 10.000 concurrent users. Big players could enter the ground in the future, like ISPs (XS4ALL.NL) or webportals. Has the company where you work considered offering Instant Messaging based on Jabber to their customers?
- Now that Pub/Sub and File Transfer are approved JEPs and there’re working implementations, what are the next things you are looking for in the specs world? And in implementations? And in general Jabber?
questions are now closed. Expect aleksey's answers sometime by the end of the week.