Technical editing by Joshua Sierles, sysadmin at 37signals.

Part of our job at PeepCode is to research new and upcoming technologies that alpha geeks are talking about. XMPP/Jabber instant messaging has been getting more buzz recently. What is it? What does it do? How can you use it to enhance your applications?

XMPP is an open, real-time instant messaging platform that is useful for sending and receiving notifications between servers and humans. You can use it to receive administrative notifications from your website or to push notifications to subscribers much more efficiently than current poll-based solutions such as RSS.

After viewing this 48 minute screencast, you’ll be able to work with XMPP from Ruby, including:

• Connect to a Jabber server
• Send presence notifications and update the user icon
• Receive message notifications and friend requests
• Use DRb (distributed Ruby) together with Jabber to send messages from a Rails application

Available to all PeepCode Unlimited subscribers, or as a single item for only $9!

Now with 25% more pixels than the competition! Uses a full 1000×600 of screen real estate with smoother, high frame rate animations.