A Brief History of Indonesian Jabber
Hello! In this post, I want to tell a story that greatly influenced my online life. This story began in the now distant 2008, and ended this summer. This is a story about the free Jabber / XMPP network in the Indonesian segment and about my contribution to the development of jabber in this country, and it is dedicated to all jabber drivers who spend their strength, and often money, to support their offspring only for the sake of the existence and prosperity of free distributed XML -network
It all started in 2008 with the unobtrusive publication of the Bombus program in one of the most popular Indonesian newspapers. Indonesia, as a truly Asian country, has already managed to telephonize to the teeth by this time, so the note caused a wide public response and a sharp increase in interest in Jabber. The first users registered and communicated mainly on Russian servers. Old-timers of Jabber may remember the days when the Indonesians were truly not overwhelmed. This trend did not really like the mobile operator Telkomsel, who decided to launch its own Jabber server. This server probably became the first real Jabber server in Indonesia. He worked at messenger.plasa.com (now does not work) and complements the rest of the functionality of this site, which was then something like a social network (now it is an online store).
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Over time, among the Indonesian users of Jabber, people with IT-education appeared who independently understood the principles of the functioning of the network. And the audience finally matured to create their own servers. This is when the first server in Indonesia, supported by an enthusiast, was born. It was the jabberid.org server, which still functions today. Whois information on this domain still stores the server launch date. The man who started the server was a businessman from Jakarta - Setyo Wibowo. The server audience grew rapidly. The Java server programmer Eddy Purwa soon entered the server team. He volunteered to help popularize the server by developing his own XMPP messenger for mobile devices that support J2ME. Soon, two names were proposed for the project - iMess and ACId. The meaning of the first is quite obvious, the second was an abbreviation of Aplikasi Chat Indonesia. The developer liked the second name, and it was chosen as the official one. The first was postponed "in reserve" in case of any legal problems with the chosen name.
Around this time, I became part of the community. I was invited to the ACId developer conference by a person with whom we had made good friends a few months before - I kept a Jabber bot on my server that this friend of mine used. The name of this friend of mine, who later became my pillar in Indonesia for many years, is Wiecliff Reynardo, or simply Cliff.
Cliff was a very big fan of the free network. His mind was agitated by dreams that someday in his country everyone would use Jabber for communication. He invited me to the conference simply for the simple reason that he considered my identity potentially useful for the future Jabber client. And I began to gradually join the team.
There were a lot of participants in the team. Most of them, however, provided only moral support, as they could not help the project by programming, creating graphics or anything else material. Among these people stood out Arnold Lapian bot. The father of two children at the time, a man in the depths of his soul is very cunning, he purposefully became my friend, noticing my knowledge of XMPP. And once he came to me about these words: “My friend, why don't we set up our own Jabber server and position it as a national one too? Look, jabberid.org is falling more and more often, and it’s lying longer and longer. ” And I felt that I could not refuse him his help. Ahead of the future, let me brag, noting that this moment can be considered the birth of the most powerful Jabber-community in the Indonesian segment - SmartCommunity.
But then, even Arnold and I did not dream of any future. On the contrary, after we really launched our project, a wave of anger fell on us. We were accused of separatism, threatened with Occam's razor. Did not like our activities and Cliff. However, it didn’t come to a final quarrel, and the factor that Arnold referred to when he argued the need for a new Jabber server played a role here. JabberID.Org began to fall more and more often, and soon, unexpectedly for everyone, it bent completely. As it turned out, its founder did not want to develop the project further. The ACId project also died: its developer, and so distrusting me from the very beginning, finally came to the conclusion that the Indonesian Jabber was brought to his knees by a foreigner and had no future.
The future of the Indonesian jabber was really foggy. The J2ME platform gradually faded away, since ordinary phones were rapidly giving way to smartphones, and for smartphones, normal customers either did not exist or were unknown to Indonesians. Under these conditions, the SmartCommunity team, which was then composed of two people, managed to gather more users under its roof than the predecessor of jabberid.org had, and subsequently took over control of the jabberid.org domain.
SmartCommunity servers functioned quite stably. Over time, the team was joined by new members, among whom were programmers - Indonesian Irfan Mahfudz Guntur and Belarusian Artem Sheremet. And as soon as new programmers appeared, new projects appeared. The time span from 2010 to 2012, despite the fact that most Indonesian users have already left the server, was marked by a real programming boom: at least seven (!) Projects were initiated. I will briefly present each of them.
The Indonesian member of the SmartCommunity community and at the same time web programmer Irfan Mahfudz Guntur, known in the community under the nickname ayes, under the impression of the Russian Juick service, decided to develop an Indonesian counterpart, which he called Lopbox. The project functioned on the lopbox.com domain for a year, after which it was recognized by its author to be hopeless and buried, despite my attempts to save it. A curious fact: despite the fact that Lopbox was supposed to become a microblogging service, the posts in it most often did not look like posts in Juick, and were more like communication in the MUC, which only emphasized that the service was a mystery to most users.
As part of the Lopbox project, I developed a PHP platform for creating XMPP components using the XEP-0114 protocol. There is nothing special to imagine, as I have already described this project on Jabber.Ru . True, the link to the repository has lost relevance due to my transition from SVN to git. Recently, the project code is posted on github .
This is a simple RSS feed based on PHP Component. There is no point in talking about him a lot, so I will limit myself to referring to his page on github .
Cathy is a jabber bot written by Artyom in Ruby. As far as I know, abandoned by the developer due to the lack of need.
Community members raving dreams about ACId in Java were so sick that they persuaded me to try to start developing the client again. Since I had no experience developing for mobile platforms, but I had a little experience with C ++ in general and Qt in particular, I decided to try. By that time, the development of a new XMPP library, qxmpp, was actively pursued , and my hands were itching to try it in action. With fine points in the development process, Artyom helped me a great deal. He was much more experienced in application programming. Unfortunately, I failed to bring the messenger to mind, but since my motivation had finally exhausted itself, I decided not to throw out the source code and not to leave them lying on a private SVN server, but just put it on github . So if there are willing to move the development of the project from a dead center, I am ready to accept the pull request. However, I am also ready to listen to criticism as useless, but I would like to ask critics to pay attention to the reason for the birth of the project.
Mukite (Multiuser Kite) - conference server for XMPP, designed to work under high loads, develops it Artem. This project also has its own page on github .
This project, which is an implementation of the XMPP server, was named after the first girl on our server, which was called Mawar Aryani. In fact, this word means "rose." The main developer of the project was my friend, who at that time was very interested in the development of XMPP and was simply interested in the state of affairs of SmartCommunity. I just helped the code. The goals of the project were lightness and low resource consumption.
The mawar story is quite interesting. At first it was planned that this demon should serve for the functioning of the SmartCommunity services. A little later, the project developer expressed a desire for the demon to function in his firm as a corporate server. The ability to make a project open was not initially considered, although the project used many libraries that required this through their licensing agreement. The points over the “and” were placed only in the summer of 2013, when the main project developer, in response to my interest, rather rudely said that he was tired of jabber and jabber problems, and he was not interested in the further development of the project. Thus, I became the owner of the project, and I had nothing more to do except to publish it on github .
The 2010-2012 season turned out to be “fruitful” not only in terms of code volumes. In 2011, began a sharp increase in the popularity of the free network in Syria. For some reason, the Arabs began to massively break on then rather small and mediocre server jsmart.web.id. The load grew and grew, and we were forced to constantly increase capacity at our own expense. Once, when we realized that this growth is not going to stop, we decided to inform the Arabs that they communicate at our expense, and must leave the server within a certain period of time, otherwise they will be blocked by IP addresses (good, lists IP networks for any country can be easily found). However, the Arabs were more intrusive than we expected, and we managed to find someone ready to pay for hosting for an audience of any scale. So slowly we came to a peak of 60 thousand simultaneously connected users on all domains - three times more than jabber.ru - and we have to take off our hat to the developers of ejabberd, who gave us such a great opportunity to simultaneously serve such a number of real users on one physical machine .
Also in the summer of 2011 I was able to visit Indonesia live and see many people who contributed to our community, as well as the founder and administrator of another Indonesian Jabber server, which had its own history and its own user community.
In the summer of 2013, there was a split in the team, as a result of which the team broke up into at least 2 parts (Belarusian-Syrian and Indonesian-Egyptian). I did not join any of them, because I see no reason for myself to do this. However, I wish both teams to successfully continue the once begun business of maintaining their modest free network nodes.
Start
It all started in 2008 with the unobtrusive publication of the Bombus program in one of the most popular Indonesian newspapers. Indonesia, as a truly Asian country, has already managed to telephonize to the teeth by this time, so the note caused a wide public response and a sharp increase in interest in Jabber. The first users registered and communicated mainly on Russian servers. Old-timers of Jabber may remember the days when the Indonesians were truly not overwhelmed. This trend did not really like the mobile operator Telkomsel, who decided to launch its own Jabber server. This server probably became the first real Jabber server in Indonesia. He worked at messenger.plasa.com (now does not work) and complements the rest of the functionality of this site, which was then something like a social network (now it is an online store).
')
Over time, among the Indonesian users of Jabber, people with IT-education appeared who independently understood the principles of the functioning of the network. And the audience finally matured to create their own servers. This is when the first server in Indonesia, supported by an enthusiast, was born. It was the jabberid.org server, which still functions today. Whois information on this domain still stores the server launch date. The man who started the server was a businessman from Jakarta - Setyo Wibowo. The server audience grew rapidly. The Java server programmer Eddy Purwa soon entered the server team. He volunteered to help popularize the server by developing his own XMPP messenger for mobile devices that support J2ME. Soon, two names were proposed for the project - iMess and ACId. The meaning of the first is quite obvious, the second was an abbreviation of Aplikasi Chat Indonesia. The developer liked the second name, and it was chosen as the official one. The first was postponed "in reserve" in case of any legal problems with the chosen name.
Around this time, I became part of the community. I was invited to the ACId developer conference by a person with whom we had made good friends a few months before - I kept a Jabber bot on my server that this friend of mine used. The name of this friend of mine, who later became my pillar in Indonesia for many years, is Wiecliff Reynardo, or simply Cliff.
Cliff was a very big fan of the free network. His mind was agitated by dreams that someday in his country everyone would use Jabber for communication. He invited me to the conference simply for the simple reason that he considered my identity potentially useful for the future Jabber client. And I began to gradually join the team.
There were a lot of participants in the team. Most of them, however, provided only moral support, as they could not help the project by programming, creating graphics or anything else material. Among these people stood out Arnold Lapian bot. The father of two children at the time, a man in the depths of his soul is very cunning, he purposefully became my friend, noticing my knowledge of XMPP. And once he came to me about these words: “My friend, why don't we set up our own Jabber server and position it as a national one too? Look, jabberid.org is falling more and more often, and it’s lying longer and longer. ” And I felt that I could not refuse him his help. Ahead of the future, let me brag, noting that this moment can be considered the birth of the most powerful Jabber-community in the Indonesian segment - SmartCommunity.
But then, even Arnold and I did not dream of any future. On the contrary, after we really launched our project, a wave of anger fell on us. We were accused of separatism, threatened with Occam's razor. Did not like our activities and Cliff. However, it didn’t come to a final quarrel, and the factor that Arnold referred to when he argued the need for a new Jabber server played a role here. JabberID.Org began to fall more and more often, and soon, unexpectedly for everyone, it bent completely. As it turned out, its founder did not want to develop the project further. The ACId project also died: its developer, and so distrusting me from the very beginning, finally came to the conclusion that the Indonesian Jabber was brought to his knees by a foreigner and had no future.
The future of the Indonesian jabber was really foggy. The J2ME platform gradually faded away, since ordinary phones were rapidly giving way to smartphones, and for smartphones, normal customers either did not exist or were unknown to Indonesians. Under these conditions, the SmartCommunity team, which was then composed of two people, managed to gather more users under its roof than the predecessor of jabberid.org had, and subsequently took over control of the jabberid.org domain.
SmartCommunity servers functioned quite stably. Over time, the team was joined by new members, among whom were programmers - Indonesian Irfan Mahfudz Guntur and Belarusian Artem Sheremet. And as soon as new programmers appeared, new projects appeared. The time span from 2010 to 2012, despite the fact that most Indonesian users have already left the server, was marked by a real programming boom: at least seven (!) Projects were initiated. I will briefly present each of them.
1. Lopbox
The Indonesian member of the SmartCommunity community and at the same time web programmer Irfan Mahfudz Guntur, known in the community under the nickname ayes, under the impression of the Russian Juick service, decided to develop an Indonesian counterpart, which he called Lopbox. The project functioned on the lopbox.com domain for a year, after which it was recognized by its author to be hopeless and buried, despite my attempts to save it. A curious fact: despite the fact that Lopbox was supposed to become a microblogging service, the posts in it most often did not look like posts in Juick, and were more like communication in the MUC, which only emphasized that the service was a mystery to most users.
2. PHP Component
As part of the Lopbox project, I developed a PHP platform for creating XMPP components using the XEP-0114 protocol. There is nothing special to imagine, as I have already described this project on Jabber.Ru . True, the link to the repository has lost relevance due to my transition from SVN to git. Recently, the project code is posted on github .
3. RSS transport
This is a simple RSS feed based on PHP Component. There is no point in talking about him a lot, so I will limit myself to referring to his page on github .
4. Cathy bot
Cathy is a jabber bot written by Artyom in Ruby. As far as I know, abandoned by the developer due to the lack of need.
5. acid-pc
Community members raving dreams about ACId in Java were so sick that they persuaded me to try to start developing the client again. Since I had no experience developing for mobile platforms, but I had a little experience with C ++ in general and Qt in particular, I decided to try. By that time, the development of a new XMPP library, qxmpp, was actively pursued , and my hands were itching to try it in action. With fine points in the development process, Artyom helped me a great deal. He was much more experienced in application programming. Unfortunately, I failed to bring the messenger to mind, but since my motivation had finally exhausted itself, I decided not to throw out the source code and not to leave them lying on a private SVN server, but just put it on github . So if there are willing to move the development of the project from a dead center, I am ready to accept the pull request. However, I am also ready to listen to criticism as useless, but I would like to ask critics to pay attention to the reason for the birth of the project.
6. mukite
Mukite (Multiuser Kite) - conference server for XMPP, designed to work under high loads, develops it Artem. This project also has its own page on github .
7. mawar
This project, which is an implementation of the XMPP server, was named after the first girl on our server, which was called Mawar Aryani. In fact, this word means "rose." The main developer of the project was my friend, who at that time was very interested in the development of XMPP and was simply interested in the state of affairs of SmartCommunity. I just helped the code. The goals of the project were lightness and low resource consumption.
The mawar story is quite interesting. At first it was planned that this demon should serve for the functioning of the SmartCommunity services. A little later, the project developer expressed a desire for the demon to function in his firm as a corporate server. The ability to make a project open was not initially considered, although the project used many libraries that required this through their licensing agreement. The points over the “and” were placed only in the summer of 2013, when the main project developer, in response to my interest, rather rudely said that he was tired of jabber and jabber problems, and he was not interested in the further development of the project. Thus, I became the owner of the project, and I had nothing more to do except to publish it on github .
Highload
The 2010-2012 season turned out to be “fruitful” not only in terms of code volumes. In 2011, began a sharp increase in the popularity of the free network in Syria. For some reason, the Arabs began to massively break on then rather small and mediocre server jsmart.web.id. The load grew and grew, and we were forced to constantly increase capacity at our own expense. Once, when we realized that this growth is not going to stop, we decided to inform the Arabs that they communicate at our expense, and must leave the server within a certain period of time, otherwise they will be blocked by IP addresses (good, lists IP networks for any country can be easily found). However, the Arabs were more intrusive than we expected, and we managed to find someone ready to pay for hosting for an audience of any scale. So slowly we came to a peak of 60 thousand simultaneously connected users on all domains - three times more than jabber.ru - and we have to take off our hat to the developers of ejabberd, who gave us such a great opportunity to simultaneously serve such a number of real users on one physical machine .
Also in the summer of 2011 I was able to visit Indonesia live and see many people who contributed to our community, as well as the founder and administrator of another Indonesian Jabber server, which had its own history and its own user community.
In the summer of 2013, there was a split in the team, as a result of which the team broke up into at least 2 parts (Belarusian-Syrian and Indonesian-Egyptian). I did not join any of them, because I see no reason for myself to do this. However, I wish both teams to successfully continue the once begun business of maintaining their modest free network nodes.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/192196/
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