Release News: the Beta Wave

We’ve been heads-down for the past couple of months, hard at work on major new functionality for Wildfire and Spark. I’m happy to announce the first major wave of releases (in early access form):

Wildfire 3.2.0 Release Candidate 2

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

  • Massive scalability enhancements. We’ve tested 30,000 concurrent connections on a single Wildfire box.

  • HTTP-Bind support.

  • All-new security certificate management.

  • Improved Mac OS X installer and management tools.

  • Numerous bug fixes.

Enterprise Plug-in 3.2.0 Release Candidate 2

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

  • VoIP SIP client in Spark, with server-side client registration and management, including call reporting.

  • SparkWeb (see below).

  • Many Fastpath improvements.

VoIP support marks a major evolution in functionality as we move from instant messaging to real-time collaboration. SIP support is a commercial feature for integration with existing PBX systems, and in the near future we’ll be ready to announce Jingle support as Open Source.

Announcing SparkWeb

!http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/sparkweb_mini.png! The power and elegance of Spark, delivered through pure HTML and Ajax. SparkWeb is a Wildfire Enterprise (commercial) feature and today we’re announcing the first public preview. Testing has primarily been done with Firefox up to this point, so support for IE, Opera and Safari is experimental.

In the near future, the Javascript library that SparkWeb is based on will be released as Open Source. The HTTP Bind implementation that powers the back-end is a standard component of Wildfire 3.2. You can view a live demo of SparkWeb on igniterealtime.org (you’ll need to register an account on ignite with a different account to get in). In the near future, we’ll have a plugin download available for testing on your own server.

Spark 2.5.0 Beta 1

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

  • Enhanced look and feel.

  • Adium emoticon pack support

  • Improved notifications - know who’s coming and going.

  • Improved Memory handling and speed.

  • Drag and drop of transferred files.

  • Buzz feature.

*Message Styles Specification

For the past several months, Adium engineer David Smith has been working as an intern here at Jive Software. He’s helped make all our software more Mac friendly – new builds for Wildfire and Spark so far, with many more Spark improvements coming soon. He’s also been working on an open specification for message styles, a very cool feature that will be coming to Spark soon. The first version of the specification was published today.

Adium message styles allow the look of the message window to be totally customized, a feature that users love. By defining an open specification, multiple IM clients will be able to share message style implementations – so, the same theme that works in Adium will also work in Spark and possibly other clients. All the Mac users here at Jive are big fans of Adium (especially given its support for XMPP), so we’re excited about this project as a way for the two products to work together. In related news, Adium 1.0 is about to be released, so check it out if you’re a Mac user.

More Soon…

We’re just getting warmed up with these beta releases, so look for more announcements soon!

Wow =D SparkWeb looks quite cool! Great work!

With all that Spark and Adium “falling in love”, maybe the typing notifications between the two clients could be fixed? I believe this bug is related to the not-quite-standard implementation of xep-0022 in libgaim, because Adium is rather picky which clients it works with: Psi for example works, while iChat doesn’t.

P.S.: I really appreciate your work on a better Mac experience. Spark is already a great client and it seems to become even better.

fabieuse – yep, that’s a good feature request. The other thing I really want to see working is file transfer between Adium and Spark.

@matt: the coolest thing would be Spark and Adium both implementing the Jingle based file transfer Google Talk uses. i believe it would make file transfers much more stable because of the NAT traversal mechanisms used by Jingle. but i guess a Jingle version of Adium is not quite “around the corner”.

Is SparkWeb going to be an opensourced or planning to provide it on commercial

license ?

Thanks,

SuperNick – SparkWeb is a commercial feature (part of Wildfire Enterprise). However, we’re releasing a lot of the building blocks as Open Source (like http binding).

Regards,

Matt

Can you tell me what the typical pricing for branded version of SparkWeb.

I assume this has voice capability.

Also, you will provide the source I assume.

Thanks,

SuperNick, SparkWeb does not have voice capability, but Spark does. A branded version of SparkWeb could be created, but the price for our professional services team to do the work would depend on how substantial the branding work is. The best way to get a price for a branded version is to contact Jive at http://www.jivesoftware.com/company/contact-form.jsp.

The Enterprise source code, which includes SparkWeb, is available when you license the plug-in. You can find pricing for Enterprise at http://www.jivesoftware.com/pricing/clearspacepricing.jsp.

Cheers,

Greg

SuperNick – SparkWeb will be a part of the Wildfire Enterprise plugin. You can see standard pricing at http://www.jivesoftware.com (just click the pricing link). If you’re looking for a different pricing model, like partnering or OEM, info about that can also be found at jivesoftware.com.

Voice in SparkWeb – that would be a sweet feature! We’ve started playing with some ideas that would make this possible, but it will take some time before we know if it’s going to work.

Source code – yes, we provide the source code to customers.

Regards,

Matt

Whoops – looks like Greg and I were responding at the exact same time.