[JDEV] 0.9pre3 is now available!

[Jeremie]

We've been working hard and added some pretty significant functionality in
the past week.  Besides the normal minor bugfixes and tweaks during any
beta cycle, we've been concentrating on performance and security.

Thomas "temas" Muldowney has been using the OpenSSL
(http://www.openssl.org/) package to bring two important security features
to Jabber.  The first is SSL connections: clients can now use SSL to
connect to and communicate with the Jabber server.  This is the identical
security currently in use every day on https:// Web sites.  The second
important addition is Digest Authentication, allowing a client to
authenticate with the server without sending the password or exposing any
password information on the "wire."  Digest authentication uses the SHA1
hashing algorithms.

Other notable additions include the creation of libxode, a utility library
for our common XML parsing and DOM routines.  The IRC service has received
a few important new features and is now usable on a daily basis as a
Jabber client.  The HTTP service has also been included, but is still in
development and of limited functionality.

The list of TODO items for a 0.9 final include: cross-platform build
testing, DSO loading, reworked build tools for jserver, major
documentation updates and user guides, and cleanup of other misc rough
edges.  We're looking to get through this list in the first half of March,
and concentrate on a polished 1.0 release after that.

	http://download.jabber.org/dists/0.9/pre3/

You can download the sources for any *nix system, and we'll have .deb's
there shortly.  If anyone can create .rpm's, please feel free.  The
0.9pre3 server is now also running @jabber.org with the IRC service
enabled.

As always, if you have any problems/questions, email the team at
info at jabber.org or join us in #jabber on irc.openprojects.net!

Thanks,

Jer