It’s more than 20 years since I got involved with chat technologies. In the late 90’s I got hired by company for developing a chat client. We did this by reverse engineering the ICQ and AIM protocols and created a compatible client. Then Jabber was announced, we switched to it immediately, using the gateway feature to talk to the proprietary systems.

Later I worked for SLTS Communications on the myJabber client, which was very popular on the Windows platform. Also one of the first clients which bridged Jabber and SIP for VOIP integration.

Then I became self employed and focused mostly on libraries which helped many companies to bring their Jabber/XMPP products faster to market. I also did lots of consulting and custom development on clients, servers and other Jabber/XMPP related products.
Also many products which were not IM related, but using the realtime capabilities and other modern XMPP features.

Working on chat clients was always one of the tasks I enjoyed most. I missed the client work over the last 10+ years. So I thought its time to get back to it ;-)

Over the last 12+ month I did lots research on clients and their UIs. This includes XMPP, other open IM protocols and proprietary chat systems.
I worked on several prototypes with different toolsets and technologies. The aim was to evaluate languages and their frameworks. As well as available XMPP libraries for creating a modern cross platform client using the latest compliance suites.

The focus was on desktop clients only. While we have pretty good mobile clients, we are lacking on good desktop clients these days. Especially on Windows. Many people still spend most of their time on the desktop.

I created prototypes with:

• various Javascript SPA frameworks, as PWA and Electron application
• Different cross platform native UI-kits and programming languages
• WASM
• Java
• .NET

I got the best results with technologies that have good implementations of the MVVM pattern. This narrowed it down to some web frameworks and the .NET platform for me.

With netCore the .NET platform became finally open source and cross platform. What’s still missing is an official cross platform GUI from Microsoft. But there is the open source XAML framework Avalonia, supporting all major platforms. And my own MatriX library is available for netCore for a while now, also open source, licensed under the GPL.

Because of the great Avalonia UI framework I decided on the netCore stack using for the new Palaver XMPP client.

Its still in very early stages. Once I can stabilize the prototype into a working client for daily usage all code will be published under the GPL license on GitHub. If anyone is already interested to contribute to this project then feel free to contact me.

Here you can see some early screenshots