Apache Vysper was started on my ICE commuter rides between Zürich, Freiburg and Frankfurt in late 2005. That was my way of learning the XMPP RFCs 3920 + 3921. Meanwhile, Vysper undertook it's own journey from a private SVN through Apache Labs to Apache MINA's sandbox. It very much looks like the final move to MINA proper is just about to happen.

Many days came and went without me working on the code, but everytime I came back, it was fun and felt like coming home.

Niklas (from MINA/FTPServer fame, now an ASF member) added Multi User Chat, worked on infrastructure and pushed to a release. Last GSoC-summer, Michael added Publish-Subscribe.

Recently, over 4 years after the first line of code was written, Vysper 0.5 was released. Far from perfect, but working. Not production ready, although some more adventurous type of people seem to use it for more serious stuff.

It's pretty classical to use: run mvn install, cd dist/target, unpackage vysper-0.5-bin.zip, cd bin/, execute the run.* script of your choice. Server starts. There are three initial users: user1@vysper.org (...user3@vysper.org) all with passwords "password1", but this can be changed easily. You can use the Jabber client of your choice to connect, but make sure you configure the account to connect to "localhost" or the concrete host where Vysper is running.