Jitsi is an audio/video Internet phone and instant messenger written in Java. It supports some of the most popular instant messaging and telephony protocols such as SIP, Jabber/XMPP (and hence Facebook and Google Talk), AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger.
The development of Jitsi started at the University of Strasbourg, France. Originally the project was known as SIP Communicator. Throughout the years our community has grown to include members and contributors from Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, China, Estonia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, UK, USA, and others.
Jitsi is based on the OSGi architecture using the Felix implementation from Apache. This makes it very extensible and particularly developer friendly.
Some more history
Through the years, the project changed its name more than once. It was originally called JsPhone and was one of the examples in the JAIN SIP reference implementation project. It then moved out to a life of its own as a separate project on java.net. That’s when it became SIP Communicator. At the time it was mostly doing audio/video calls through SIP and hence the name. It was one of the first to support IPv6 telephony.
Near the end of 2005 SIP Communicator was completely rearchitectured and a new OSGi based design was chosen so that plugins could be easily written for the project.
In 2011, after successfully adding support for Audio/Video communication over XMPP’s Jingle extensions, the project was renamed to Jitsi since it was no longer a SIP only Communicator
Acknowledgement:
Jitsi and JAIN SIP projects, though administratively separate, are still in close collaboration.
Jitsi was originally created by Emil Ivov who was at the time a student at the University of Strasbourg, France. Today the core team has grown and counts developers and contributors from all over the world. A complete list of those may be found in the Team and Contributors section.
