Jabber is an open extensible chat protol, and more. Think of it as a similar service to ICQ or MSN Chat and you'd probably get the picture. Much more information can be found at Jabber.org

After experimenting with the protocol for a while I've given some notes below - I have a simple C++ chat library which I'll be making available once I've finished writing it ;)

Currently my library allows:

• Login
• Logout
• Message sending + Receiving
• Listing online users.

A preliminery version is available from the following link, along with a basic README and a sample application which allows you to send a jabber message from the command line.

• jabblib.tar.gz [16k]

I've hacked up a quick patch to allow a jabberd server administrator to log all conversations. This is the successor to my simple, fragile, previous attempt.

Download the diff below and apply it to the jabberd-1.4.2 source. Rebuild and start the server with the '-L' flag to enable logging.

This work was sponsored by a purchase to my Amazon wishlist :)

The logfiles will end up in /var/log/jabber-%d-%m-%y.log, where they will be automatically rotated every day. You could easily setup some scripting to compress and delete old logs.

• jabber-1.4.2-logging.diff