Hi folk!
As you -may- have seen from my blog at http://blathersource.org/, I have decided to cease development of Kraken. You can read about the details of my decision at the aforementioned link, but I wanted to speak here a bit about what’s going on with Kraken from Ignite’s perspective and what you can expect to see out of me.
First off, Kraken’s source, issues, and existance is being moved back here to where it grew up at Ignite Realtime. Shortly after it’s move I will package the latest code up into an official 1.1.3 release and we’ll have it back up on the plugins page and downloadable from within Openfire itself. (now keep in mind that Kraken has never been good at being live upgraded, so even if you upgrade it from within the web interface you’ll probably need to restart) It’s current site, http://kraken.blathersource.org/ will be shut down probably in a week or so and I’ll have that address redirect to here. Basically it’ll be treated like any other large project here at Ignite Realtime.
The caveat is – it will not have a lead developer. I do not have anyone lined up to take over the project. That said as Openfire itself gets upgraded it should be fairly easy for the devs here at Ignite to make little tweaks to Kraken as needed to keep things in sync. Perhaps at some point someone will step up and take over as lead dev as well. If you are interested in that please pop by the chatroom at open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org or post in the forums and start that discussion. =) I will not be involved in it but if I look back here someday and see someone has picked development back up, it will make me smile.
So what am -I- getting involved in instead of Kraken? I’m actually going to be teaming up with the lead developer of Spectrum (http://spectrum.im) which is a similar project to Kraken but works with all servers that support external transports. One of my first goals is to write up a few plugins to make the integration as clean as possible. My first target is going to be Openfire. One of the things Spectrum has already taken care of that was a big reason why I originally moved from PyAIMt and PyICQt is that, upon registration, you get a flood of subscription notifications for every contact you had on the legacy system. As you can imagine that can get ugly and even crash your client if your client wasn’t expecting to handle quite that amount of notifications. Even before I enabled what is termed the “remote roster” feature on Spectrum, I connected to Facebook and got a bazillion (around 300) notifications which nearly crashed Pidgin. Anyway, the remote roster functionality requires a minor mod to the XMPP server itself. That mod is already written for Prosody and ejabberd, so I am going to make that happen for Openfire and Tigase. The code for Openfire will be hosted here amongst Openfire’s own code (like a lot of the smaller plugins). I’ll post something in the Openfire forums about it when it’s ready. Is the integration going to have a cute web interface like Kraken does? No. I’m not planning on setting anything like that up. However the current plans are to make the remote roster functionality happen and also if any ‘hacks’ need to be put in place to make Spark continue to work the way it does with Kraken, I’ll put those in the Spectrum plugin (if possible).
So anyway – twas fun writing Kraken and getting her rolling but it’s time we part ways. Feels kind of like breaking up with someone! =/ I hope folk enjoy what’s “left” of Kraken and that someone picks up the reigns, and I hope folk enjoy the new work I’ll be involved in with Spectrum!