It was about time I resurrected the azdev.co.uk site. It's coming up for 8 years since I produced any software under the AZ Dev. name, which is a hell of a long time. But, I'm back, and I'm working on OpenFire which I will probably start talking about semi-regularly here.

The idea is to implement the XFire instant messaging protocol and build a suite of tools on top of this to help with communications at large LAN parties. XFire is the de-facto standard messaging client for gamers due to it's seamless in-game integration, which makes it incredibly useful for broadcasting messages to people. The problem? There is no facility to send a mass-PM or orchestrate group communication. I doubt this was ever a real requirement for a normal messenger client, but LAN parties rarely have normal requirements.

The project is open source, though I prefer to work along for hobby projects like this (I never really enjoy management, and the overhead of proper delegation and coordination is too much to bear for small projects like this). You're more than welcome to check out the source however, the project is hosted on google code:

http://code.google.com/p/openfire

Right now I have the low-level innards working and can communicate with the main XFire server. I've only implemented the message types which are relevant to what I am doing right now, but over time this should become a fairly complete XFire client API. The first release is targeted for July, and it's on track so far.

That's all for now. Until next time...