Ignite Realtime: Ignite Realtime Blog : 2007 : October

Our Client Strategy

Posted by Matt Tucker Oct 31, 2007

So, what's up with Spark? Many of you have commented on the fact that the pace of development has slowed and that Derek is less present in the community. Now that a major new version of SparkWeb is out, it seems like a good time to provide a more detailed status report on everything happening around client development.

First up, an announcement: Derek has taken a new position (Sales Engineer) inside of Jive. So far he seems to be loving it, but I'll let him comment on this blog post with further details. Unfortunately, that means that Spark has lost its lead developer. For the time being, other team members have stepped in to help out. We're committed to providing bug fixes and minor new fixes to Spark for the foreseeable future. It remains one of the best cross-platform XMPP clients available.

Since Spark development is slowing down, what's next? Most of Jive's XMPP client efforts are now focused on the web via the SparkWeb Flash client. We're using the same technology base to add real-time features to Clearspace. Further, the upcoming Adobe Air technology offers the intriguing possibility of building a new desktop client using Flash. To us, it all seems like the perfect triple play -- a single code base that can be used for Sparkweb, Clearspace features and a new Spark desktop client. Only Sparkweb is ready so far, but you'll see new real-time features in Clearspace soon and we'll keep everyone updated on a desktop client based on Adobe Air.

Change isn't always easy and I'm sure that some of you will be disappointed to hear that our approach to how we build Spark is changing. There may be some rough spots as we move from one technology to another, but we're pretty excited about where things are headed.

15732 Views 42 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: planetjabber, spark, sparkweb

Openfire Unleashed

Posted by Gaston Dombiak Oct 31, 2007

Openfire is the award-winning instant messaging server known for its simplicity, elegance, performance and extensibility. With each new major release, scalability has been improved; however, being able to scale a lot without redundancy or high availability poses a risk to every connected user if the single server goes down.

After many months of work that risk is now part of the history. Openfire Enterprise 3.4.0 provides support for clustering. Clustering will let you run Openfire on several machines serving the same XMPP domain. Clustering can be enabled with just one click from the admin console. Machines running Openfire Enterprise will automatically meet between them to form a cluster. With clustering you not only get high availability but also improved scalability. In our internal load tests, we got more than half a million concurrent connections sending lots of packets in a cluster of just 2 nodes.

Another nice addition to Openfire Enterprise is SparkWeb. Users can now connect to the server and chat from your website. Read the SparkWeb: Next Generation blog post for more information.

On the open source side we also have excellent news. More than 30 new features and more than 30 bugs were fixed. Personal Eventing via Pubsub was added so you can now publish your geo-location, music you are listening to and let subscribers be alerted. From the admin console you can manage users roster. Moreover, it is now possible to retrieve photos from LDAP and use them as users avatars. The complete set of changes can be found here.

You can download Openfire from here. Openfire Enterprise can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy,

Openfire Team

5109 Views 2 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: planetjabber, openfire-server, xmpp, openfire, clustering, clustering

SparkWeb: Next Generation

Posted by David Smith Oct 31, 2007

One of the new things other than clustering in Openfire Enterprise 3.4 is a new release of SparkWeb. This marks a number of major transitions for it:

Simplified Installation

First, it's now built into Openfire Enterprise. No more downloading a separate plugin, and no configuration required. You'll find it in a new sidebar item in the "enterprise" tab of the admin console.

Moving to Flash

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Second is that it's entirely new code. As we worked on the original SparkWeb, we ran into many limitations of the "ajax" (html + CSS + javascript + xmlhttprequest) platform, including browser compatibility issues, difficulty with localization, and the inability to support any sort of richer collaboration experience like voice or video. As a result, Derek DeMoro wrote a prototype of a web based XMPP client in Flash, using XIFF and Adobe's new Flex API. The new SparkWeb is descended from that, rather than from the previous version.

Work In Progress

There's good and (temporary) bad with this transition. The new code supports vcards and avatars, and is significantly smaller, resulting in quicker page loading. There's also a revamped UI, including contact list filtering much like Spark has. On the other hand, group chat support and secure connections are not quite ready in the new code, and are planned for the next minor Openfire Enterprise release.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post them in the ~~Openfire Enterprise Support forum~~

11040 Views 5 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: xmpp, openfire, flash, sparkweb, webapps

Openfire 3.4 Clustering Beta

Posted by Gaston Dombiak Oct 3, 2007

During the last few years we have been listening to the community and our Openfire Enterprise customers. You all had the same question: "When will Openfire support clustering"?

I'm happy to report that Openfire 3.4.0 Beta now has support for clustering. Clustering will let you run several machines serving the same domain thus allowing you to scale your services and at the same time providing continuous service even if one machine goes down. Today we are officially starting the beta process that will last until October 31st.

Unlike other Ignite beta programs, this beta comes with benefits and important discounts for those of you that help us test the server. We had to rewrite big portions of the server, and we would like to get many people testing the server to ensure a better product. We thought these incentives might help us recruit more beta testers.

You should know that we have initially tested the server internally and even deployed it to our public servers, so this beta may be more stable than some other beta products.

People interested in participating in the beta program can read this welcome document to learn more about the benefits and discounts you can get by participating. You can find all of the information (download links, documentation, instructions, and more) in the new Openfire 3.4.0 Beta space in the Ignite Community.