Monday, February 4, 2008

A New Kind of Application Server

As you probably know, I'm a cofounder of Coversant which, at its heart, is an XMPP development platform. Most of our larger customers (thousands of simultaneous users) are ISV's that have built on the SoapBox Platform®. We allow you to easily develop XMPP applications using .NET technology.

A really long time ago, I wrote about some possibilities for using the SoapBox Platform including examples of what our customers were doing at the time. This was before there microblogging was popular, or I probably would have used that example too. :)

The last couple of weeks there seems to be quite a bit of buzz around the subject of using XMPP as an application server, and that gets me really excited! A friend/competitor Matt Tucker of Jive Software wrote in his company blog about how XMPP is the future for cloud services. A "real" online author (aka not a member of an XMPP company) even picked up Matt's article and ran with it. Yesterday, a little buzz hit Slashdot when another friend/competitor Mickael Raymond of Process One wrote about introducing the XMPP application server (when I wrote this, it seems Process One was experiencing a bit of the Slashdot effect -- hopefully by the time you read this it will be gone and you can read his article), which is an exploration of building a Twitter-like microblogging system on top of their XMPP server. Great stuff, indeed!

This is wonderful news and very validating for me personally! It seems after six years of committing to the infant technology, I wasn't crazy after all, and XMPP is a good platform for presence/messaging systems! And if you're in the market for .NET based XMPP solutions, head on over to the SoapBox Developer site. :)

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About the Author

Wow, you made it to the bottom! That means we're destined to be life long friends. Follow Me on Twitter.

I am an entrepreneur and hacker. I'm a Cofounder at RealCrowd. Most recently I was CTO at Hive7, a social gaming startup that sold to Playdom and then Disney. These are my stories.

You can find far too much information about me on linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/jdconley. No, I'm not interested in an amazing Paradox DBA role in the Antarctic with an excellent culture!