The Buddycloud project aims to build a rich user and group messaging ecosystem that can easily be embedded in any app, and relies on an open protocol (based on XMPP) and open-source software.

I contributed to the Buddycloud project from 2012 to 2013 as a volunteer.

The Buddycloud protocol is built on top of several technologies:

• XMPP (“Jabber”) is used to connect clients to servers and servers to other servers;
• XMPP extensions PubSub (XEP-0060) and MAM (Message Archive Management, XEP-0313) are used to provide realtime notifications and data synchronization between clients and federated servers;
• The messages and events are Atom entried, grouped in Activity Streams;
• The initial Buddycloud server was written in CoffeeScript, and the initial web client in plain JavaScript with Backbone.js (it was 2012 after all!);
• Later versions of the server and client are written in Java and AngularJS.

Now some highlights about things I did on my own:

• Added support for content deletion that worked well across federated servers using Atom Tombstones: my first contributions to the Buddycloud protocol and server!
• Integrated Embedly for rich link previews in the initial web client.
• Took over the initial server component development and improved it a lot:
  • improved packaging for major Linux distributions;
  • added lots of unit tests;
  • fixed lots of bugs;
  • improved the DB schema to make use of PostgreSQL XML support, making the whole server safer and faster at the same time.
• Wrote a test suite that ran a real XMPP server + 3 Buddycloud instances to provide realistic test scenarios.
• Wrote a whole console client (in Python) that did not rely on the HTTP APIs but only on native XMPP connections.

Buddycloud was a lot of fun for me. I like its approach of designing the protocol before implementing it a lot, as opposed to “defined by implementation” protocols which often later prove hard to re-implement for interoperability purposes. I learned a lot while working on Buddycloud, and I’m very grateful to Simon Tennant for his help and his support.

I worked on Buddycloud on my free time as a volunteer, and I only stopped because I had not enough free time left after I joined Findspire.

Fun fact: I won a Buddycloud T-shirt at FOSDEM in 2012! The challenge was to setup a working Buddycloud instance and get in touch with the team… Had a really nice time with them at the XMPP “realtime booth”. I still proudly wear that T-shirt from time to time 😉