Open Realtime.
Ignite Realtime is the community site for the users and developers of Jive Software's open source Real Time Communications projects. Your involvement is helping to change the open RTC landscape.
Open Realtime.
Ignite Realtime is the community site for the users and developers of Jive Software's open source Real Time Communications projects. Your involvement is helping to change the open RTC landscape.
We've released the first beta of Smack 3.1.0. Although it's been about a year since the last release, this version is jam-packed with great new features and bug fixes. Check out the changelog for full details.
We expect the beta process on the release to be relatively quick, but much will depend on the stability feedback we get. There are also a few last changes that we're looking to get in before the final release.
Gato and I are sitting together drinking beers and hacking on Ignite code. After a hiatus (too long), we're both back to working on Smack and Openfire weekly. As I'm writing this, Gato is doing some super low level Java debugging to figure out a strange XML parsing error that we're seeing when running the Smack test cases. Assuming we get to the bottom of the problem, we plan to package up and release a new beta release of Smack. It includes lots of great improvements, but I'll leave the details for the next blog post. We have several goals around our weekly hackathons:
- Jump start software releases -- it's time to get more regular releases of all the projects going again.
- Recruit and empower community leaders -- there's already a large number of people in the Ignite community doing some amazing work on the code. Now it's time to equip them with the tools to be as effective as possible and to let them take on more explicit leadership roles.
- Have some fun -- hence the beer
We're looking forward to demonstrating progress and to keeping the Ignite projects at the forefront of the XMPP world.
A great book about installing and administering Openfire has been released: Openfire Administration, by Mayank Sharma (a contributing editor at Linux.com). Some of the topics covered:
- Installing Openfire
- Administration of server settings and users
- Integration with Active Directory and LDAP
- Tuning Openfire for large numbers of users and high performance
- Enterprise features like logging and auditing
- Much more...
So far, I've only just started reading through the book in detail. The writing seems to be clear and detailed, while keeping a light-hearted tone. I also love the fact that the author includes lots of pictures -- it makes understanding some of the administration tasks much simpler.
We're thrilled to see the first book about an Igniterealtime Open Source project. If you get a chance to check it out, please let us know what you think.
I use Openfire and SparkWeb everyday and recently starting evaluating Clearspace to power the community I am building for my wife's education consultancy (www.inspiredfutures.co.uk). As I had limited computing power and memory to work with on my hosted server, it became expedient that I needed to integrate all three products under the same web server and Java JVM.
The first thing I did was to make an openfire plugin out of Clearspace
The next thing I did was to enable SparkWeb display an HTML page from its chat container
The result is what you see above and I am very pleased with it (chuffed as we say in the UK). The benefits of integrating Openfire and Clearspace has already been mentioned here . Adding SparkWeb to that combination in order to have realtime messaging, desktop sharing, Red5 audio/video calling and a SIP phone makes a compelling case for me to use Clearspace
I have reservations about real-time integration with web applications that use the MVC model based on Stuts like Clearspace or even PHP applications like SugarCRM. Even Salesforce.com also falls into the same group because they all build their UI on the server and everytime the user does anything that requires a server fetch, the screen goes all blank while you wait for the whole page to be rebuilt from server-side Java code.
Putting a softphone or an IM client as a widget in these applications requires constant connect/disconnect cycles as the user moves from page to page. It reminds me of my attempt to build a real-time application on an Apple iPhone and a softphone in Salesforce.com. What we need is to be able to keep our widgets UI resident on the client as well as the user session in the plugin on the server. I am curious to see how Jive Software implements the realtime widgets in Clearspace.
In the meantime, I am happy to make SparkWeb my container for real-time web applications as I am getting biased towards Adobe's open-source Flex as my de-facto web client application development platform. I learnt a lot from studying the SparkWeb code and I am planing on developing some Clearspace widgets that use SparkWeb's features through the Javascript External Interface to make the integration complete.
If you want to use SparkWeb as a container for your web applications as I have done, pick up the latest version of the Red5 plugin from here. Copy and edit index.html. Change the httpLabel and httpURL parameters to your preference.
We are very pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.6.0! It has been a long time coming and may well include the highest number of bug fixes and improvements we've ever had in a single release. Don't quote me on that, but it's certainly the largest number I recall seeing. =) While the bulk of them are bug fixes, there are a couple of big improvements I would like to highlight!
Clearspace Integration Improvements
We've improved upon the integration between Openfire and Clearspace quite a bit. Most are bug fixes and performance improvements, but also some new backend features that further solidify the bond if it is set up. Openfire now includes a Clearspace tab when integration is enabled so help make sure the link is performing properly. On top of that, there are a lot of features in place in preparation for the addition of real time chat support in Clearspace. More information will come on that at a later date. We've also renamed the tables Openfire uses to make it easier to install it alongside other products in the same database, if you so choose. The automatic upgrade procedures will take care of all of the hard work for you, so you shouldn't need to give it a second though.
LDAP Support Improvements
Openfire's LDAP support had some holes in it here and there that should be filled now. Altbasedn, for example, was not used everywhere. There is now support for alias following (or rather, turning it off), paged results (to make sure to get all of the available results instead of a subset), and a number of bug fixes for existing functionality. Internally, a lot of the code has been cleaned up. I still have a couple of things up my sleeve here and there for a future release, but I'm quite pleased with how this is looking now.
Multiple Conference Services
Every wished you could have more than one conference service set up with different rules? Maybe you wanted one for public access with no room creation rules and restrictions, but also wanted an internal "protected" service that abided by strict rules. Maybe you just wanted to set up some sort of specialized set. Maybe you never wanted -any- conference services and just wanted to delete them. Whatever the reason you might have, you can now set up as many or as little as you want. In some cases, plugins may even be able to take advantage of a specialized service setup.
BOSH (HTTP Binding) Improvements
With many thanks to our Google Summer of Code student, Safa Sofuoglu, we now have updated BOSH 1.6 support, and a ton of misc bug fixes and improvements. Improvements in this area were also performed on the connection managers! I encourage you all to read about it in his report:
GSoC 2008 Report: Openfire and SparkWeb
More Configuration in Database
The openfire.xml config file was getting bloated and a lot of the configuration in it could easily have been moved into the database. As a result, we've moved just about everything that doesn't fall into a category of:
- how to connect to the database itself
- config info specific to host itself
Why you might ask? In a clustered environment, it makes it so you can set Openfire up once and now have to reconfigure the providers and such for each cluster member individually. It also paves the way for support for things like, admins stored in the database, which means you can update the admin list on the fly, instead of having to edit openfire.xml and then restart the server.
Plugin Updates
It's important to update the following plugins to account for changes in the 3.6.0 API:
- User Search
- IM Gateway
- Fastpath
- Monitoring
Where Do I Get It?
You can download Openfire 3.6.0 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.6.0 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.
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