I am glad to announce that IronPython 2 is now capable of running my XMPP
Python library: headstock.

.NET has already an excellent XMPP SDK called agsXMPP that is a native
.NET/C# framework. However I’m a Python developers at heart and I had
started quite a while ago writing my own XMPP library in Python using the
most excellent Kamaelia framework (designed for concurrency).

For a while IronPython had severe shortcomings that prevented it running
simple Kamaelia applications. Today I was able to run a simplechat demo
using a vanilla IP2 on Windows with only one single modification to the
logging module (thanks Seo). To be honest I didn’t expect it to go through
:)

The chat demo is simple enough but means more complex examples using XMPP
PubSub will work as well (they are all based on the same framework).

Now this isn’t production ready or anything. For instance the TLS support
is broken (hopefully something easy enough to fix) so you won’t be able to
connect to Google Talk for now.

Moreover I’m not sure the code is that fast considering how I had to
simulate an incremental XML parser atop System.Xml (this allows for a
XML stream to be parsed without requiring the full document or even
fragment to be read first).

This is a great news for me because it means I’ll be able to move ahead
with more work using IronPython 2.

I had to.
More seriously though since the work I’m doing with XMPP and AtomPub these days, I thought it be a nice idea to try and plug into Twitter somehow. I guess I won’t be using Twitter much for anything else than testing. We’ll see.

A sad news for French speakers as the French O’Reilly editor has shutdown completely due to the lack of sales. They’ll be missed.