We can answer your ejabberd questions

Here are some commonly asked questions – and our straight-forward answers.

What does ejabberd mean?
The name ejabberd stands for Erlang JABBER Daemon. Jabber is the former name of the XMPP protocol (extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol).

What programming language is ejabberd written in?
ejabberd is mainly written in Erlang, a programming language that is renowned for offering high fault tolerance. ProcessOne carries out all of its development work using Erlang, as it enables us to create reliable and robust products. The language was designed specifically for building real-time, distributed applications and has been used successfully for projects with millions of lines of code.

What operating systems does it run on?
ejabberd is a multi-platform technology and operates in virtually any environment, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.

What protocol is supported?
ejabberd adheres to XMPP (extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), a widely known protocol that has been standardised by The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The evolution of XMPP is handled by XMPP Standards Foundation, whose mission is to create the world’s best protocols for instant messaging and other forms of real-time communication.

Is ejabberd a mature technology?
ejabberd was first developed in 2002. This may not sound like very long ago, but instant messaging itself only really started to take off at around this time. What ejabberd lacks in age, it more than makes up for in experience. Many large organisations have been running large-scale instant messaging services based on the ejabberd platform for several years. These instant messaging servers support millions of users on a daily basis – reliably and securely.

How secure are ejabberd-based instant messaging systems?
Very. ejabberd supports encrypted connections, including STARTTLS, SASL and SSL, between the clients and the servers. Organisations do not need to use a central server, such as one operated by an ISP. Instead, they run their own instant messaging servers. This gives them much greater control over what security measures they put in place and allows them to more closely monitor who can access their system.

Does ejabberd comply with open standards?
Yes. ejabberd is an implementation of XMPP (extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), which is the fastest growing open standard for instant messaging. ejabberd is not simply open to standards; it also integrates well with legacy or proprietary systems thanks to gateways, called transports. These gateways can be used to allow users to communicate with other users located on other networks, such as AOL Messenger, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo Messenger.

What is the maximum number of users that can be supported on an ejabberd platform?
There is no maximum (or if there is, no-one has reached it yet!) The platform is sufficiently scalable to support thousands of simultaneous users per node, and companies can set up multiple nodes in a cluster to increase their capacity without experiencing any degradation in performance. Clustering is a useful capability as it also allows companies to increase their fault tolerance. If one node fails, the other clusters will be unaffected.

Is ejabberd suitable for international use?
Definitely. For example, the web-based administration interface is available in multiple languages.

How can I find out if it offers all the features I need?
Get in touch with us and we’ll tell you! ejabberd offers a wide range of features from a comprehensive system management console to support for virtual hosts and a wealth of innovative user features. What is more, new features and enhancements are being developed, tested and released all the time.

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