A new useful #feature has been merged into Movim today. It will also be part of the upcoming 0.19 #release.

This change relies on the standard XEP-0201: Best Practices for Message Threads and allows you to #reply to a chat message using any XMPP account using Movim.

You could already find such feature on other chat platforms like #Telegram or #WhatsApp, the flow is also quite similar: on supported messages, click on the reply button and a little preview will appear next to the chat box input, fill in your message, publish, et voilà !

You can also navigate to the original message by clicking on the little preview (if this message is currently shown in the conversation).

Enjoy :)

A few days ago I discovered that the #Eloquent database library (the one that Movim is using for a few years now) had some events that could be caught by an event listener.

With this simple mechanism #Movim could be aware of when exactly a #SQL request is done during the execution time.

The Movim #architecture is based on several processes that talk to each others, and each connected session (each user connected to a specific XMPP account) is having its own sub-process. The main issue with this architecture is that all those processes relies on a common database (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and each process open an unique connection to the database. See How's Movim made? Part I - The Architecture to know more about this architecture.

When you start to have a lot of users connected on the same instance, this is opening lots of connections to the database. This is creating a congestion and can slow down the general performances.

This simple commit ask Eloquent to close the connection after a few seconds of inactivity. Eloquent is reconnecting automatically if a new SQL request is made after the disconnection. This allows to free-up the socket resources once "we don't really need it anymore".

And here is the result once this commit deployed on nl.movim.eu

It's been six months since the last #release, and for the 0.18 – Oterma one there's a lot to show!

So let's dive in this list of exciting features and changes that you will find in this new release.

Notifications

0.18 is coming with quite some changes regarding how the notifications are handled and displayed within Movim. This also came with lots of bug fixes to ensure that the counters are up-to-date everywhere across the UI and between all the devices.

One of the first notable changes you will find is how the global chat counter is behaving. This counter is now displaying the total number of unread discussions and not the total number of unread chat messages anymore.

Related to this change, an update on the chatrooms bookmark specifications is now allowing you to save a per-chatroom notification configuration. With this new feature you'll be able to choose, for each chatroom, if you want to “always be notified” for each new messages, “only when you're mentioned”, or “never”.

Movim can now use sound to notify you of a new incoming message, if you allow it to (see the configuration panel).

Stickers, drawing and emojis

We also improved some existing chat features. Some work has been done by Christine Ho on the Draw widget. The drawn lines are now smoother, even on large resolution pictures. The feature has also been extended to allow you to draw on existing pictures you upload from your device.

Christine Ho also improved the existing emoji picker to add useful search bar, you can find it when trying to add a reaction bellow a message.

A new pack of fresh meme stickers was also added to the stickers panel.

And finally, the Movim emojis support has been updated to Unicode 12.0, bringing a pack of new emojis in.

Video conferencing

A big part of the time spent on this release was focused on the video-conference features. The related code was heavily reworked to ensure a smooth compatibility with the #Conversations Android client, it's still not perfect but works already quite well.

This was especially because of the integration of XEP-0215: External Service Discovery in the project. Allowing the web browser to easily perform STUN/TURN discovery (it's a way to discover alternative routes on the Internet for the video and audio feeds to be streamed on) using the #XMPP server services.

The call flow was also split to conveniently allow audio-only calls.

And the screen-sharing feature was integrated on the video-side. Useful when you want to quickly show a document or a presentation during your call!

Video-conferencing is hard. For this release we made quite a lot of work to improve the user experience but we are still not totally satisfied with the result. Some more work will be needed in the upcoming releases to really deliver the best we can offer for that feature.

And a many other things…

Chat and chatrooms

The interfaces between the chat and chatrooms (header bar, drawer menu) are now unified to display general information the same way. A little gallery was added which displays recently sent and received pictures.

The pictures handling in chat messages has been improved. Movim is now trying to resolve picture URLs, even if they were sent using a client that doesn't embed pictures in messages.

The scrolling behavior in chat was greatly improved and simplified, a little "go to bottom" button was also added.

Movim now handles the XEP-0319: Last User Interaction and can therefore be more precise to tell you the last time your contacts were seen active.

Post publication

Movim was already automatically saving your draft posts while you were writing, but since this version it actually displays when a draft has been saved. The post publication panel was also slightly redesigned to be clearer and more accessible.

Performance

On the technical side, a PresenceBuffer system was added to handle wave of presences coming from the network and mass insert them in the SQL DB. This reduces by a factor of 10 to 100 the number of requests that are done to the database during those "spikes" of incoming presences from the network. This little feature greatly improves logins speed and shortens the time it takes to join a new chatroom.

Favicon

The favico.js library, that was handling the little counter in the browser tab icons had been removed and rewritten using only vanilla JavaScript, keeping only the required bits which also made it way smaller. This was actually the last (external) JavaScript dependency coming with Movim.

XMPP Authentication

Regarding the authentication process, Movim now supports XEP-0368: SRV records for XMPP over TLS to directly connect to XMPP using an encrypted socket (better than the historical STARTTLS negociation system that is still used as a fallback mechanism). Regarding the IP resolution Movim now uses the Happy Eyeballs mechanism to resolve the server IP on IPv4 or IPv6.

Android application

Finally, the official Android app gained nice features thanks to the improved integration of Movim on your phone.

The notification handler has been reworked to handle newer Android versions, conversations are now stacked properly.

From any application you can now share a URL to Movim directly and publish it in a Post. In the future we are planning to add more sharing capabilities like this one (share to contacts or chatrooms for example).

Related to the video-conferencing improvements, audio and video calls are now launched in a separate task to allow you to switch back easily to your chat or publications while having your call. This makes it close to the experience you can already have on desktop.

Finally some work was done in #Movim and on the Android app to improve the general performance, especially regarding the touch features and general responsiveness.

To conclude…

As always you can test all those features on our official pod, or deploy them in a few steps on your own server :)

We always need some funding to help us promoting Movim and covering project costs, feel free to help on our Patreon.

And stay tuned for the upcoming releases, it seems that there are some interesting features already planned ;)

That's all folks!

Thanks to the awesome work of Singpolyma there is now a bridge between the #XMPP and the #SIP networks. Both standards are able to exchange information to setup audio calls.

A few things were fixed in Movim to do so (mostly related to the format of the account identifiers used for the protocol bridge system) but now everything seems to work fine. You can find the tool at this address: git.singpolyma.net/cheogram-sip. It is still in heavy development but it progressing quite rapidly.

Here is the same call from Movim and the #Linphone SIP client. Calls are also working with the Conversations client as well.

More than a simple tech demo, this can bring quite a lot of useful possibilities. SIP is widely deployed especially in telephony. Calling a remote IP phone directly from your XMPP account could be really convenient.

Using a simple movim.eu account nowadays you can already connect to several other networks, such as IRC or Telegram and group everything in one UI. Having SIP on top really brings the whole experience to another level.

Have fun with Movim and movim.eu and don't forget to support the project by sharing links around!

The movim.eu #XMPP server now supports connections through #WebSockets.

This means that if you're using a #web client like conversejs, you'll be able to connect directly using your movim.eu account.

If you are a #Movim user. Nothing changes as Movim is using standard good ol' TCP/TLS connections to login 😉

The clients that wants to connect to movim.eu using WebSockets will normally automatically discovers the endpoint (using the related XEPs). If not, it is available manualy at wss://movim.eu/xmpp.

That's all folks!

Thanks for your support!

The 0.18 release is coming soon. I'm doing a few more optimisations and adding some last features for the 0.18 (such as the "last seen" feature, drawing on images before uploading them, UI improvements…) along the other exciting ones (video-conferencing, screen sharing, big performances improvement, Unicode 12.0 emojis support…).

I'm working on Movim for more than 11 years now. In a few days we will reach 8K commits on the main repository.

And after all those years of work, on my free time, my goal hasn't changed: deliver a simple, good looking, light and accessible communication platform for everyone.

Movim has been and will always be a Free Software and I'm doing my best to keep the code light, optimized and simple to allow it to run on a maximum of devices, even low end ones.

If you want to support the project, you can always help us by giving a bit on the Patreon page. This money is for the moment just covering the server and domains expenses. A bit more could allow me to fund some nice stuff such as new stickers pack (like the 3 other ones that are now in the project) or real stickers and goodies… or cover my travel expenses to do conferences and presentations around Europe (not in the upcoming months unfortunately, you know why…).

Have fun with Movim !

edhelas

Movim 0.18 is planned to be released soon.

In the meantime, let's have a look at one specific feature that is really useful when you integrate Movim with the Spectrum2 - Telegram bridge.

For those that are not aware, XMPP can connect to other chat networks using tools called "transport". One of the most used is called Spectrum2 and can connect to many other networks thanks to its libpurple support.

Telegram transport setup

What will we do here is:

• Setup telegram-purple in Spectrum2 on Debian
• Connect it to a XMPP server (here ejabberd)
• Adapt the transport to integrate with Movim

Setup Spectrum2 and telegram-purple

Here I will not detail the basic installation, the official Spectrum2 documentation is pretty complete.

Once the repository is setup, please install the base package and the libpurple module:

apt install spectrum2 spectrum2-backend-libpurple

For telegram-purple the README is also quite complete

Create a Telegram transport

Once all the packages are setup, we will create a transport configuration file. You can reuse the spectrum.cfg.example located in the /etc/spectrum2/transports/ as a base.

# nano /etc/spectrum2/transports/spectrum_telegram.cfg

This is basically the config file that I used for my own telegram.movim.eu transport:

[service]
server_mode = 0
user=spectrum

jid = telegram.movim.eu
password = spectrumpassword
server = 127.0.0.1
port = 5347
backend_host = 127.0.0.1

users_per_backend=10

backend=/usr/bin/spectrum2_libpurple_backend
protocol=prpl-telegram

web_directory=/home/movim/upload/spectrum
web_url=https://upload.movim.eu/spectrum

[identity]
name=Telegram Transport
type=telegram

[logging]
config = /etc/spectrum2/logging.cfg
backend_config = /etc/spectrum2/backend-logging.cfg

[database]
type = sqlite3

[registration]
enable_public_registration=1

When Spectrum2 will connect to the Telegram network, the stickers will be downloaded as files on the server. By default an ugly path is simply sent to the XMPP clients. We will turn it to a proper URL and let Movim to its magic.

To do that we need to configure the Web Storage module. You can also find more documentation about it there.

web_directory=/home/movim/upload/spectrum
web_url=https://upload.movim.eu/spectrum

It's pretty self explanatory. The downloaded stickers will be put in the web_directory directory. The second parameter, web_url, is basically telling Spectrum2 how to general its URL before sending them in the messages.

Configure ejabberd

Then we need to add a new service in our ejabberd.yml configuration file.

  -
    port: 5347
    module: ejabberd_service
    access: all
    ip: "127.0.0.1"
    global_routes: false
    hosts:
      "telegram.movim.eu":
        password: "spectrumpassword"

Once everything is setup, restart Spectrum2 and ejabberd. For Spectrum2 you can do it using spectrum2_manager or a dedicated systemd configuration file.

Configure our web server

We then need to expose those files to the web. A simple nginx configuration will handle it.

server {
    server_name upload.movim.eu;

    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

    …

    root /home/movim/upload;

    location /spectrum {
        alias /home/movim/movim/spectrum;
    }
}

Fix the nasty file rights with Incron

If you start to use your Telegram transport at this point you'll notice that the stickers URLs are returning a 403 Forbidden error.

Indeed, Spectrum2 is writting the files in the directory using it's own rights. And this can't be configured.

We will then use another useful tool called Incron. This tool works like CRON but instead of working on time events, it works on file events.

You can find a pretty complete documentation there.

apt install incron 
nano /etc/incron.allow # add your spectrum user there
sudo -su spectrum
incrontab -e

In the incrontab file well then change dynamicaly the rights of the files once they are wrote in the directory (check the documentation for more details).

/home/movim/upload/spectrum   IN_CLOSE_WRITE          chmod 664 $@/$#

Enjoy your nice Telegram stickers in Movim

In Movim, nothing more to do. With the version 0.18, Movim will try to resolve the incoming messages that contains a URL and see if it's a valid picture. Which is the case for Telegram stickers.

You can also note that it works for any other incoming picture URL, including those sent using Conversations or other XMPP clients.

That's all folks!

#telegram #xmpp #movim #transport #stickers #ejabberd #admin

A bit more than a month after the #Movim 0.17.1 Catalina release I'm pleased to deliver two new releases and a new tool to all the movim.eu users. Let's dive in all those new exciting features.

Movim 0.17.1

This minor #release focuses on a few things. We could call it an "integration release". In fact most of the work done were to help with the new Debian package and for the new Android app release.

Regarding the Debian package, I'd like to personally thanks Dominik George aka Natureshadow from Teckids e.V. and mirabilos for their continuous work on the dependency packaging, patches and general maintenance of the .deb. They were both added in this release on the Core Contributors page. Thanks!

Upload widget improvements

The #Upload #widget, that is used to upload files and pictures during the Posts and Messages publication has been redesigned. You can now drag and drop files from your explorer directly in the drop area. The picture visualization has also been improved and now display more information about it.

Integration with the new Movim Android release

The Movim #Android app has not been updated for a while. This new release improves the integration experience one step further.

In fact, the top bar is now transparent and integrates with the rest of the user interface. The pod switching button is not shown anymore during the startup process (that was slowing down the launch of the app) but directly in the navigation bar (you will need to upgrade both Movim and Movim Android to handle this feature). This allows Movim to launch in only a few seconds on a standard 4G connection.

On the Chat page, it is now possible to close the conversations using a simple drag-to-left movement. Similar to what you can find on Telegram for example.

Movim Account Panel

Last but not least, all the movim.eu #XMPP accounts have now access to a new panel. Available on api.movim.eu/accounts it allows some account wise configuration to complete some features unavailable client side.

To authenticate a "one click link" mechanism has been added. Once your identifier entered this authentication link will be send directly by chat allowing you to access your Account Panel.

Through this panel you'll be able to list all the existing files you ever uploaded using your XMPP account, in the future you'll be able to also delete them.

Email to XMPP

This Panel also contains an exclusive feature, the possibility to receive #emails on your XMPP account.

This feature is only working one way, in fact it's our mascot, and now postwoman Miho that will take care of delivering the emails as chat messages directly to you. Please notice that the attachments are not forwarded and we are not applying any form of SPAM filtering on them. The emails are transferred as it in their textual version to you.

That's all folks! And don't forget, to prevent the spread of the #COVID19, stays safe at home!

Here comes a new exciting Movim release. Two months after Cesco, here comes Catalina.

In this releases, many fixes but also some nice new features, both for the social and messaging sections of Movim.

New features

Global chatroom search

From the chatrooms widget, you can now directly search rooms globaly and join them in a click. This new feature relies on the search.jabber.network service, that is also implemented in Conversations and Gajim.

New design for the XMPP forms

The XMPP forms handling and display has been fully redesigned. With nice icons and proper labels it will now be simpler to configure Communities, chatrooms and other XMPP items.

Disable social features

Pod admins can now disable all the social features in one click in the admin panel. This is useful for those that only wants to use Movim as a chat frontend for their XMPP services.

Messages retractation

After ConverseJS Movim is the second XMPP client that implements the message retractation feature. This allow you to delete any published messages from the history. Be careful, this only works if the contact is also using a compatible client.

New night theme colors and design adjustments

Some small design adjustments were made to improve user experience. Some useless paddings were also removed to give more space to the content (like around the chat bubbles).

The night theme is now having darker, bluer colors, strongly inspired by the Aritim-Dark KDE/GTK theme.

Fixes and improvements

Beside those changes, many things were fixed in this release, regarding chatroom presences handling, notification counters or complex JID handling (especially if you're using transport services such as IRC or Telegram).

But the biggest internal change was to bring a new request type to the frontend. Now the current Movim UI (HTML + Javascript + CSS) can request the backend in 3 different ways regarding the usage.

1. Pure WebSocket requests: the request and the response are not linked together. This is the default case for the Movim requests.
2. Ajax requests to the daemon: this is useful when the UI needs to know if the message was handled by the server (useful when you publish articles or send chat messages) and if those messages needs to be processed by the daemon (to trigger XMPP requests for example)
3. And, since this version, some good ol' pure Ajax requests. They directly requests the HTTP backend, without even touching the daemon internaly. This is useful to load pieces of the UI and allows parallelisation. With this changes you'll see that parts of the UI (especially on the chat page) are now loaded way faster, without disturbing the daemon.

What's next?

In the upcoming weeks we're planning to do some maintenance on the XMPP services. Add some new features and do some administration. On Movim side, nothing really planned for now.

That's all folks!

#movim #ajax #http #release #xmpp