"One of the more widely embraced Open Source projects to emerge over the past few years has been Jabber, an instant messaging system initially conceived to overcome the limitations competing IM giants placed on users in their quest to seal up as much of their markets as possible.
Jabber, Inc. is a company that sells enhanced and customized IM solutions built around the core Jabber product. It recently announced the Jabber Everywhere program, whereby businesses and small organizations could try out a limited but fully functional version of its server software for no cost.
Our initial reaction to the offering was poor, and it was with some relief that, just as we prepared to publish this overview, the company released a second version of the package addressing a few of the problems we experienced.
At its core, Jabber is a set of protocols built around XML that describe how to allow instant messaging clients to communicate. The reliance on XML is a distinctive feature of the Jabber protocol's, and it fits well with other programming communities, such as Perl programmers, who have built a robust set of tools that allow Perl programs to interact with Jabber servers and clients."
