I've recently been procrastinating with a Jabber Server - or more precisely an instant messaging server that supports the XMPP IM protocol.

I wanted to see how easy it would be to run a server, and to interface with it (using PHP). The server I used is the OpenFire server, which is surprisingly easy to use, and very intuitive!!!

If you have Java installed, just download the version without the JRE, this doesnt have an installer, but you dont need one!

Just download, and run openfire.exefrom the openfirebin directory and it pretty much sets itself up! You just need to run through some configuration (web based) and your up and running!

You can set it up as a service by running in a command window (in the dir above) openfire-service /install then openfire-service /start - this has to be run as administrator on Vista.

It seems to fully support the XMPP protocol, and is very cool. You can try to connect to it at precision.ucd.ie, it supports on-the-fly user creation, so you can use a client such as Pidgin (or Adium for Mac) to connect to it and create a new account!

It may not stay there for long, and I dont expect anyone to use it (as why would you when you have MSN etc.) but its interesting to set-up and play with.

I will hopefully be using it as part of my research soon, so its not all procrastination! hehe

Incidentally, there is a PHP interface that I found, which seems quite cool, I haven't got anything working yet, but the example script works OK (locally).