It’s been a busy summer for Tobias Markmann, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation’s 2011 Google Summer of Code students. He has been working on implementing File Transfer support for Swift, using the fresh Jingle XMPP protocols. I’m happy to announce that we integrated Tobias’s work as an experimental feature into the main Swift branch, where it will be further developed and brushed off before being enabled in our nightly builds and releases.

For those interested in the nitty gritty protocol details: file transfers are negotiated through the Jingle File Transfer protocol (XEP-0234), using SOCKS5 (XEP-0260) as the main transport, and In-Band Bytestreams (XEP-0261) as fallback. To improve connectivity, we use both the NAT Port Mapping Protocol and the UPnP Internet Gateway Device protocols to allow connections through most firewalls, and SOCKS5 relaying proxies in case all else fails.

The new feature has been tested for interoperability against (slightly modified) development versions of both Pidgin and Gajim, which, together with the Pidgin-based Adium, cover a large XMPP user base. After both clients update their protocols to track the newly published Draft specification versions, all 3 should be able to exchange files seamlessly.

What still remains to be done is lots of testing (both internal testing, user testing, reliability testing, and interop testing), bugfixing, and some refactoring here and there to clean up some of the code (which already is in very good shape). Our end goal is to reach a rock solid implementation, with a near guarantee that file exchange will always work (which experience teaches us is far from trivial).

To conclude, we’ld like to thank Tobias for contributing this great new feature to Swift, for providing valuable protocol feedback to the XSF, and for laying the foundation to other exciting Jingle-based features (including voice/video conferencing).