A new version of the Jappix plugin for Openfire is available with support for WebRTC restored back. It only supports Chrome version 26+ and is compatible with the WebRTC plugin for Spark. It uses The Openfire JingleNodes plugin for media relaying via Openfire server when WebRTC peers can connect directly with each other.

Video Chat

Group Video Chat

How to use

Click on the webcam icon to share video in an active chat/groupchat.

With chats, the other party receives a prompt to share their audio/video.

Groupchat does not prompt and auto shares audio and video with all participants.

Chrome version 26 stable and Firefox (Nightly build) now support full desktop screen sharing. In Chrome, you have to enable "Enable screen capture support in getUserMedia()" with the chrome://flags URL.

As the desktop screen is treated as a video device, you only have to make a change to the getUserMedia method for video and your existing application will work with no further changes. As an example, I only made the following change to my webrtc video example and now it allows two users to share their desktop screens

navigator.webkitGetUserMedia(
    {video:{mandatory: {chromeMediaSource: 'screen'}}},
    this.onUserMediaSuccess.bind(this),
    this.onUserMediaError.bind(this)
);
 

To see it in action, just click on this URL https://webrtc.free-solutions.org:8443/webrtc/screen.html from two different PCs. Register with two different user names (no spaces or special characters).

It is hosted by the very good kind and generous folks at free-solutions.org

Bla, bla bla...

WebRTC is on the march

With a stable implementation in Chrome since ver 23, applications are appearing as fast as flowers blooming in Spring. The nightly and developer builds (ver 25+) have more features including full desktop screen capture and ability to send it as a video stream over a peer connection. By adding DTLS encryption to Chrome nightly build, Google have achieved interoperability with Firefox nightly build.

Back in 2007 at ignite realtime, we built the first open source Flash to SIP gateway for SparkWeb and followed that up a few months later with Red5phone, the first open source web soft phone. Red5phone has now evolved into Apache OpenMeetings Red5Sip.

Fast-forward to today and we now have the iNum initiative from Voxbone which enables us to have a new geographical independent phone number for free phone calls on the Internet. iNums are global, supported by most telephone carriers including my former employer BT in the UK. Combine WebRTC with iNum and you can send and recieve free phone calls anywhere in the world provided you have a web browser and an iNum.

That was all the incentive I needed to get started on webrtc-phone.

Ok, so what does it do?

The prime purpose is to make and recieve free phone calls with iNums. It can also make SIP calls with domains that accept them.

For more details go to the project page.

How did I make it. What did I use?

• Customized version of Phono SDK for webrtc only that connects to the Voxeo SIP cloud and handles the Jingle signalling and WebRTC media. Flash support has completely been removed. It only works with Chrome ver 23+ for now. Firefox support will come later
• Openfire Server with websockets and redfire plugins to lookup iNums and map to Phono SIP addresses using XMPP Presence for anonymous users.
• Candybar and DialPad? GUI components from AT&T Foundry and &Yet
• AddThis social sign on service for Facebook, Google and Twitter

Free calls! Whats the catch?

Calls from iNum to/from the public PSTN still costs money. If you divert your iNum to a mobile or landline, your voice service provider will charge you for diverting the call. You will be paying for all calls from your iNum to your mobile or landline phone.

Calls from the public PSTN to your iNum cannot be intercepted and are therfore are not supported by webrtc-phone. If your iNum is dialed from a regular phone, the call will end up on whatever device you have forwarded it to. It is only when the number is dialed from a webrtc-phone elsewhere that it will be re-mapped to your webrtc-phone session.

Can I play?....

Live demo is hosted at https://webrtc.free-solutions.org:8443/webrtc-phone  by the very kind folks at free-solutions.ch who are also members of the ignite realtime community.

Project source code is hosted on a Git repository at http://code.google.com/p/webrtc-phone/source/checkout, so go ahead and clone

WebRTCis definitely a game changing technology and desktop phones may soon be on their way to join VHS players in yesterdayland

A while back, I developed an Openfire plugin for Candy (Chats Are Not Yet Dead) which enabled multi-user voice chatting. It included a voice bridge to mix the audio streams on the server side and a Flash-based component to capture and play the audio streams in the web browser. It kinda worked, but has too many issues to be used in a production context.

I have replicated that application with WebRTC just using only HTML5 and JavaSccript. No server-side component for audio mixing and no browser component to handle streams. All audio mixing, capturing and playing is handled by the web browser.

As usual, there are caveats. A star topology with a server-side audio bridge will scale into hundreds of conference participants while client side peer to peer audio conferencing will struggle to get up to 10 users per conference. A ten person audio conference will consume 90 (10x9) peer connections.

However, getting away from conventional ringtone and telephone signaling using SIP or even Jingle allows to explore alternative approaches to voice communication and experience distant digital talking as naturally as possible without the restrictions of a telephone or software replacement. This is definitely the way to go. Sisko calling O'Brien

Click on a tab brings the group chat room into focus. Click again will turn voice on and broadcast everything you say to everyone in the group chat room. Click one more time and your voice is turned off. It works as a toggle. Click on another group chat room tab and your voice be turned off when focus moves away. On the other side, you can turn off the voice of any participant by using Candy's ignore feature. Just right click on the contact and select ignore. Select unignore to restore back the voice of the participant.

It is that simple. No ringtones, just use your voice with text and say hello

Don't take my word for it, you can try it it out here and the source code is attached to this blog for those would like to a look at the implementation. Even though it does not use SIP or Jingle signalling, It uses Jingle Nodes to act a a media relay when users are sitting behind restrictive routers or firewalls.

You need Chrome version 23+ or Chrome Frame with Internet Explorer. Candy has also been updated to work with the Openfire Websockets plugin as well.

Now that WebRTC is now live in Chrome version 23, which is now rolling out to the public, expect some new exciting web applications with audio and video that will change the way we communicate beyond what we have seen so far with Skype and Flash.

The SIP community have already forged ahead with SIP over WebSockets and a number of SIP signaling libraries have started to appear. I am not convinced that employing heavy bloated SIP messages for WebRTC signaling is the best approach, but I am not ready to re-open an ancient debate.

Meanwhile at Ignite-realtime here, If you want to see what you can do with Openfire using the WebSockets and JingleNodes plugins, then take a look at my demo based on the Mobiecents SIP demo  I replaced their SIP JavaScript library with a simpler XMPP Jingle library. I also added support for Jingle Relay Nodes to bridge the media when both peers cannot communicate directly with each other.

To try it out, you would need two PCs with webcams both running latest Chrome version 23+. Use any two unique user names (eg user1 and user2) with no spaces and special characters. From user1, enter contact JID to call as user2@redfire.4ng.net/user2 or vice-versa.

For those interested in the source code, it is attached to this blog.

By Tom Evans

A few of you more intrepid Openfire fans may have noticed a bit of recent activity in one of the branches of the Openfire SVN repository. Well, some of your fellow developers have been working behind the scenes to provide clustering support for PubSub, perhaps one of the lesser-known modules of our beloved real-time collaboration server. PubSub is an implementation of the XEP-0060 specification which extends the XMPP standard to add publish-subscribe functionality to the XMPP Core. However, if you have ever tried to use this module in Openfire, you may have been disappointed to discover that it was not designed to work in a clustered deployment. In fact, PubSub was forcibly disabled when deployed in a cluster! The main focus of the development effort was to address OF-205 and implement clustering support for the PubSub module. This work is now complete and the PubSub module is cluster-enabled and ready for action.

My Kingdom for  a Cluster!

However, during the course of this development effort, the team also took a critical look at the current clustering implementation itself (the "clustering" plugin). This solution is currently the only way to run Openfire in a clustered configuration (where multiple servers share the load). Unfortunately this plugin is inextricably tied to Oracle Coherence, an enterprise class (and enterprise priced) middleware component. A recent quote from Oracle put the price of Coherence (EE) at well over $300K for a smallish deployment ... clearly an untenable solution and incompatible partnership with the Openfire project.

We looked around for clustering alternatives that would have better affinity with Openfire, and landed with Hazelcast (Community Edition). Hazelcast is an open source clustering and highly scalable data distribution platform for Java. It enjoys a large deployment base and is licensed under the community-friendly Apache 2.0 license. There are also commercial licensing options available for deployments where professional support and enterprise security (among other features) are must-haves. This looked like a perfect fit for our needs, and likely for the Openfire community as well.

Where Two or Three are Gathered...

We are pleased to annouce the immediate availabilty of a new Hazelcast-based clustering plugin for Openfire. Starting today in the trunk of the Openfire SVN repository you will find the new plugin (/src/plugins/hazelcast/). Note that you will need to also setup the latest version of the Openfire core (currently 3.7.2-Beta) to use the new plugin.

We are looking for a few brave Openfire afficionados who can take the latest build and give it a whirl with your various deployment scenarios:

• How many users and/or cluster member nodes do you have?
• Which modules/components of Openfire are you using?
• What is your typical JVM configuration? Preferred OS? Network topology (load balancer, LAN/WAN, etc.)?

Your feedback is very important and will help ensure that this new clustering solution will be a robust and stable component in the next Openfire release.

Those who have wrestled with the existing clustering plugin will hopefully find the new solution to be much simpler to configure and deploy ... and certainly much lower cost! There is a README file included with the new Hazelcast plugin that documents the basic steps for setting up an Openfire cluster, including links to the supporting Hazelcast documentation (if needed).

Testing ... Testing ... Is this thing on?

Please take the new build for a spin and report your feedback here. We will be posting an article to the main community page before long, but would love to have some initial feedback from the core developers before engaging a wider audience. No doubt there will be some bugs and configuration glitches ... can you help us find and fix them?

Thanks in advance for your consideration and assistance.

Cross posted from http://community.igniterealtime.org/message/224947#224947

--UPDATE--

I have added a slighlty modified version of hazelcast that is backwards compatible with Openfire 3.6.4 and Openfire 3.7.1. Unzip and copy the clustering.jar file to your plugins folder.

Please test and post your results at http://community.igniterealtime.org/message/224947#224947

Just posted version 0.4 of the Jappix plugin for Openfire  at http://code.google.com/p/openfire-jappix/

It includes:

• Jappix Nemesis Alpha 2 [0.9.2~dev]
• Quercus 4.0.25 PHP Java Engine

It also includes experimental support for:

• WebSockets (needs Openfire 3.7.2)
• WebRTC audio only with Jingle (needs Chrome Canary Version 22.0.1210.0)

It is compatible with Jitsi-Jingle  version 0.4 and Candy plugin for Openfire ver 0.4. You can make the following audio calls

• Personal P2P Jingle voice chats between Jappix and Spark users

• Group voice chats between, Jappix, Candy, Spark and SIP phones using an MUC

This is very experimental stuff and a few outstanding issues to be fixed to make WebRTC work properly with Jitsi-Jingle. use at your own risk