I can't even begin to say how awesome this is. I'm so excited to see something outside the realm of conspiracy theories about emulation, even if this project isn't aimed to become a full-scale server emulator.
Please let me know if you have use for someone with an education in game engineering and current experience in PHP web development. My legitimate compiled language skills might be a little rusty, but working in a C-based language every day, it shouldn't be too bad to get back into the good stuff.
In a totally unrelated matter: with all of this chatter about using CoXMPP as a vehicle for virtual tabletop gaming, have you given any thought to including dice rolling commands? AIM does this with a pretty simple format, it's something like //roll-dice-#-sides-# (ex //roll-dice-5-sides-10 for 5 10 sided dice), which would cover the overwhelming majority of dice-based gaming needs. Alternatively, dice notation common to P&P would be less verbose for traffic concerns, ex /roll 5d10 for the same logic.