User:Neustradamus/Jabbin

Jabbin (formerly Joim) is a cross-platform free software for instant messaging (chat) and VoIP phone calls via XMPP protocols.

It is the first XMPP client with VoIP in December 2005.

Features
Jabbin features usual instant messenger functionality. Besides that the support for VoIP over XMPP protocols and the integration with social networking platforms are central features of its functionality. Jabbin has comprehensive softphone functionality complete with dialling pad, address-book and list of calls and thereby presents itself as an alternative to the popular software Skype, that is compatible with many other VoIP products (such as e.g. Google Talk).

It supports point-to-point encryption using TLS as well as for text chat also end-to-end encryption following the OpenPGP standard.

Availability
As free software Jabbin gets released together with its source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is available for Linux and Windows systems; a port to Mac OS X is in development. For many Linux distributions there are precompiled binary packages (of version 2). For Windows there is also an official installation-free version.

Under the hood
The program is based on the Psi XMPP client. Both are written in C++ and use the cross-platform Qt library to provide their user interface. Version 3.3.x of Qt is used so it's not very easy to build Jabbin on Windows using only open-source components. Either unofficial (but legal) Windows port for Qt 3.3.x/X11 needs to be used or Qt 3.3.x commercial license required)

Like Psi, Jabbin uses the XMPP communication protocol, but uses the libjingle library for peer-to-peer VoIP connections. Jabbin incorporates the libjingle support from Psi (where it was still considered experimental) with additional Windows support and uses the free voice codec Speex.

History
Jabbin was created as a fork from Psi and initially named “Joim”. It added mainly support for VoIP to the functionality of the predecessor. The first beta version (1.0) was based on the developper version 0.10 of Psi and released in December 2005 It was the first XMPP client with support for VoIP, for which it used the now superseded XMPP protocol extension Transport for Initiating and Negotiating Sessions (TINS). After standardisation of the standardised successor protocol “Jingle”, VoIP support was also added to a later version of Psi on that basis and is found in many important XMPP clients nowadays. Also Jabbin uses Jingle since version 2.0 beta, based on code that was taken from a development branch of Psi and extended to work on Windows. It was (after the standardisation of Jingle and the release of Google Talk) initially still the only XMPP client with VoIP support on Linux systems as well as the only Open Source client with Jingle support, because the Psi project took until end of June 2009 with releasing a version with the then still experimental Jingle support.

After years without a lifesign the Jabbin project released a new version (Beta 3.0, “Flaming Phoenix”, at first only for Windows systems) on 25 January 2010. Integration with various social networking platforms has been added.