Good things come to those who wait!

The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the beta for the next release of Openfire. This release contains a number of important  fixes and improvements to stability and XMPP protocol compliance. You can find a full list of fixed issues here. This beta is also the first version of Openfire to be released by the Ignite Realtime community under the Apache License v2.0.

You can download the 3.7.0 beta release here. Please provide us your feedback on the Ignite Realtime support forums. It would be helpful if you would tag your comments, discussions and questions with a tag that reads "openfire370beta"

As always, but particularly since this is a beta release, make sure to backup any existing version of Openfire and the persistent storage that it uses, before upgrading!

Some important security related notes to this release:

• Openfire no longer ignores the system property to disallow password changes via XMPP. With previous releases, it was not possible to prevent users from changing their password via their XMPP connection. (CVE-2009-1596)
• Fixed a XSS attack on the admin console login form.

Protocol compliance improvements:

• Publish Subscribe (PubSub)
• BOSH (http-bind) xml namespace compliance fix.

Some highlights of this beta release:

• Improves how Openfire handles "idle" connections. Some of you may have  the system property xmpp.client.idle set to -1 to work around  previously broken behaviour. You may now let it default to 6 minutes or  set it to your preference.
• Improved Openfire's caching to be less prone to memory exhaustion by correctly calculating cache size usage.
• Fixed a bug where admin console login into a newly installed Openfire server would fail until restarted.
• Fixed a bug with shared rosters within a LDAP environment.
• Openfire now ships with the latest JRE (1.6.0u21).
• A memory leak with the Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP) was fixed.
• Openfire's custom log interface has been replaced with SLF4J and a Log4J backend.
• Fix issues with self signed SSL certificates.
• A number of improvements and fixes were made to the Multi-User Chat (MUC) configuration pages on the admin console
• There were also some improvements made to the plugins.
• There are also French, Russian, and Lithuanian langauge translation fixes for Openfire and some of the plugins.

I'm happy to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of Tinder. This new version brings interesting new features, a number of bugs fixes and general performance improvement.

Recently, I published a document describing a problem that I dubbed the Achilles' heel of Openfire. Tinder 1.2 introduces the AbstractComponent implementation, which will allow you to circumvent this problem easily. Additionally, AbstractComponent removes the need for the repetitive work that traditionally goes with implementing a full featured, spec-compliant component. Have a look at the Component Developer Guide for a detailed description.

Tinder 1.2 no longer depends on Openfire-specific logging. Instead, Simple Logging Facade is used, which will allow you to integrate with your existing logging framework easily. Finally, caching strategy and implementation have been modified to give you better performance.

A detailed list of changes can be found in the Tinder Release Notes. Did I mention that starting with 1.2 we're releasing the code under the Apache 2.0 license?