Hi,

here a short and long awaited update on my Google Summer of Code work. I've been finishing the update of libpurple's Entity Capabilities implementation to the latest version and added a bit functionality so that 3rd-party plugins for Pidgin can query for some contact's capabilities or adding capabilities to Pidgin's feature list which they implement. It's been tested and seems to work. Thanks to Arne König for testing all this and giving useful feedback.

Here a long overdue and promised update on my work on libpurple's XMPP protocol plugin.

Currently I'm finishing support for XEP-0115 version 1.5 in the protocol plugin. I've decided to only support latest version of the XEP because it's most secure. However, what does this mean exactly?

Well, former caps worked so you give a version string and so called short names with your presence stanzas. Though shortnames are really obsolete and we already have a registry for features identified by their namespace and the former version of the protocol didn't provide any amount of security. One could tell you that it's Psi or Tkabber and send a whole different feature set and all clients with that version would be associated with the wrong feature set of the poisoned cache.

Since XMPP is (becomming) the biggest player from all the instant messaging protocols out there, there are a lot Google Summer of Code™ projects in the XMPP field this year. BOSH, the highly discussed dream team for connecting to XMPP from mobile or other limited network environments, is covered by a lot projects this year.
My GSoC project is, not only, about adding BOSH support to libpurple, the C instant messaging library which powers desktop clients like Pidgin and Adium and web clients like Meebo. libpurple doesn't only cover nearly any proprietary instant messaging protocol but also some open protocols like IRC, SILC and of course XMPP. For XMPP, as the (future) major instant messaging protocol, it's most important that XEPs get implemented, coded and used in real life. There is a huge number of XEPs which aren't implemented and may never be, who knows.