Hi, I wondered if anyone here has evaluated/used both, specifically with your developer hat on? I’m looking at both and really not entirely sure how to decide which is better based on things like performance, licensing, documentation, architecture, maturity and community size/activity.
Any advice is welcome, I hope not to start any flaming
I did take a look at Tigase, and my thoughts are:
Pros:
It looks well tested, e.g. a commerical chat site is using it
Looks stable, has good clustering features, and can scale well
Multi-domain support for non-secure (ssl) connections
Good docs available in HTML and PDF form.
The lead developer (kobit) responds and communicates well to inquires posted on his forum site.
Watch out for:
His focus has been on scalability and performance, and as a result not all of the standard XMPP compliance features are implemented, e.g. MUC in clustering.
Configuration is command line.
That’s about all I ascertained. I have not set it up myself or tried to install. One thought I had when studying it is it looked like I might be able to configure a S2S Tigase/Openfire setup, which I thought could be useful in a best of both worlds.
HTH
I have used both OpenFire and Tigase. Check out this post that compares and contrasts OpenFire and Tigase. I agree with you. Tigase is more about scalability and OpenFire is more about ease of administration and reduced IT costs.
I don’t know much about MUC but the XEP compliance that I have used in Tigase is pretty good so far.
For Tigase, configuration is actually through a file called init.properties that gets loaded on start up. Kobit is working on opening up more of Tigase using JMX.
Hi Glenn, that’s a nice little post. One thing you don’t cover though is licensing, you might consider adding that to your blog post because to anyone wanting to add custom code rather than use them as ready-made products, it’s an important point.
Hmmm, now that’s an interesting point, jdx. My understanding is that Openfire is GPL v2 and Tigase is GPL v3. I take it that you are against v3?
Actually, I don’t have a clue what the difference between v2 & v3, but dislike GPL generally. Well, maybe not dislike, since people writing free software are under no obligation to let me use it at all.
But Openfire has moved / is moving to Apache 2.0 license and I’m sure that’s something anyone reading your blog would consider important; to me anything using full GPL is pretty much a deal-breaker (though I believe Tigase offers a commercial license too).
Here is a recent post on customising Tigase for a deeper integration experience. I wonder if there is some similar advise for OpenFire? It would be nice to know how the two compare when it comes to a unified web and chat experience.