Monal 2.3 will be out soon and will work fine with any standard XMPP server. However there are a few things you can do prepare to get the best experience. The two new features in Monal are :
- XEP-0280 Message carbons (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html)
- XEP-0198 Stream resumption (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0198.html)
Carbons allow you to keep all of your conversations in sync. So if you send and receive messages on your desktop or phone it will show up on the other
Stream resumption allows the client to reconnect quickly if it is disconnected. This will drastically reduce bandwidth usage and save battery life.
Prosody:
- XEP-0280 Message carbons https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_carbons
- XEP-0198 Stream resumption https://code.google.com/p/prosody-modules/wiki/mod_smacks
Openfire:
- XEP-0280 Message carbons (should be possible with route.all-resources set to true)
- XEP-0198 Stream resumption (not currently available)
I believe jabberd and Tigase also support both but I haven’t tested yet.
On the client side, there are no native OS X clients that support carbons (other than the weird Monal build I did below). I believe pidgin supports it on linux and windows and using Macports or fink on OS X (https://www.pidgin.im/download/mac/)
Woho! Message Carbons. It has been very slow moving, but clients are finally starting to support it.
PS: The website copyright year is a bit behind the times.