Status of APEX?

Hello, I've just begun poking around the BEEP/APEX sphere. APEX in 
particular seems to be a great substrate for some technology I've been 
thinking about for a few months. However, the current state of affairs 
looks kind of disheartening -- there are a couple of RFCs and 
Internet-Drafts, but apparently no real implementations; the WG home 
page seems about two years out of date; and this mailing list is nearly 
deserted.

Is there actually real activity going on with APEX? Is it feasible for 
me to start designing a higher-level protocol that will use it, or will 
I have to wait a long time (or forever) for a real working APEX 
implementation?

I hope this doesn't sound too gloomy. APEX sounds wonderful on paper, 
and I really hope that it's going somewhere so I can take advantage of 
its potential.

--Jens Alfke

(A bit about me: I was on the IETF IMPP list for a while when it first 
started, back when it was called Rendezvous. More recently I've done 
some work with Jabber, and I created and am still working on Apple's 
"iChat" instant messaging client.)