Gazing into the crystal ball

As of December 2007, we have jumped onto the release train process and have been releasing a new version of Openfire every 3 weeks. Many important features have been added and several issues were fixed. Here are some relevant new features that were added:

  • Certificates created and signed by CA can be imported from the admin console

  • Added support for XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities

  • Avatars may now be updated when using LDAP

  • Improved connection pool recovery logic by switching to proxool

  • Created Email Listener plugin

For the first and second quarters of 2008 we decided to focus on features that are going to be useful for enterprises, but not restricted to the enterprise product. Example of these features are:

Use TLS and SASL when connecting external components

A new extension named XEP-0225: Component Connections was created for this feature that we think it’s going to be useful for companies with very strong security requirements. This feature will not only require some changes to Openfire but also to our Whack library. Whack is our external components open source library that we never pushed publicly in the community but we do support and use internally.

Let external components connect to the same Openfire instance and register for the same domain

In order to provide redundancy in external components we should let them connect to the same Openfire instance. Openfire will then use round robin to distribute the requests to the connected external components. Therefore, only external components that are stateless can use this feature unless they are stateful and communicate amongst themselves, perhaps in a cluster environment. Similar to the previous feature this feature will imply a change on Openfire and also to the Whack library.

Add auditing support to the admin console

Many people have requested this feature and it was decided to implement it for Openfire 3.5.0. When running standalone the auditing information will be stored in the database of Openfire but when running integrated with Clearspace then the auditing information will be stored in Clearspace which acts as the main repository.

Database optimizations

In the past we focused on optimizing the Java code when under heavy load and now it’s time to focus on the database specially when dealing with large sets of data. This work should help users log in faster, retrieve their rosters and perform any frequent operation quicker. Overall we know that Openfire has great performance but doing an in-depth review is never a bad idea.

Release a new version of XIFF

While working on SparkWeb, our web version of the popular Spark client, we ended up doing lots of nice improvements to the XIFF library. Having tested those changes for a while we now feel confident to push out there a new release of XIFF. Meanwhile, every week we have been updating our SparkWeb instance that is publicly available. Feel free to use it and give us your feedback.

Other things that have been brewing in our heads but are still not planned for the immediate future are:

  • Multi domain support

  • File sharing in rooms based on XEP-0214: File Repository and Sharing

  • Framework for chat transcript management

  • XEP-0195: User Browsing to know what other people are browsing on the web

  • XEP-0194: User Chatting to know the group chat rooms where people joined

If you are interested in seeing some other feature that has not been planned please speak up and leave us a comment. We will create a Jira issue, if one does not exist, so people can vote. Highly voted issues are taken in consideration when building the roadmap of the products. The current roadmap can be found here.

Enjoy,

– Gato

Please fix low-level bugs

1)lost characters http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/162578

2)compression bug http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/159430

3)bug with interaction between bombus and openfire

I think this bugs are serious…(especially 1) and 2) )

Thanks.,

XEP-0214: File Repository and Sharing implementation is a great idea. XEP-0129: WebDAV File Transfers would be interesting too.

I’d suggest full support for :

  • the new version of XEP-0048: Bookmarks ;

  • XEP-0222: Persisting Objects via Pubsub ;

  • XEP-0223: Private Information via Pubsub.

XEP-0154: User Profile would be interesting for decentralized social networks.

A SIP-SIMPLE/XMPP-Jingle gateway would be perfect, specially with PSTN-SIP numbers.

And a new tab for pubsub management in the web admin interface would be useful also.

Cheers.

Everything is looking good, I would only add the following things:

  • Could you make the publicly available sparkweb instance available over HTTPS? I would love to try it but I don’t fancy giving credentials over HTTP.

  • Our company has pondered the Enterprise license repeatedly, the poor Spark history management (compared to other IM clients) and “slow” bugfix turnaround has led us to wait till something develops, Flex or otherwise. Any updates on the future of Spark I know would be appreciated by the entire community, not just us.

  • Hybrid authentication/contact information would be nice as well. So that LDAP could be used to authenticate, but vcard data could be pulled from another source for certain fields.

Openfire really is great. Spark however is what causes the most frustration at present. It still can loose chat transcripts for open conversations!

Cheers.

It’ll be a great idea to implement pubsub in smack.

3’d party su-smack is too low level now…,

vanaf, 1) is a MINA bug, so it cant be fixed very quickly. Though i havent noticed this for a while on 3.4.4.

Gato - auditing support in Admin Console, you mean in Enterprise version?

Thanks everyone for your feedback. They are greatly needed and appreciated. It’s very important for us to understand the needs of the community.

Features described in the blog post will be present in the open source edition. Therefore the auditing will be part of the open source. Even though most of the mentioned features are important to the enterprise world we want to make them available in the open source edition.

Wroot & Vanaf: Both of these issues are related to MINA. We hope to fix them soon (i.e. get a new MINA version that fixes them)

  1. lost characters http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/162578

  2. compression bug http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/159430

Thanks,

– Gato

The Openfire roadmap sounds good to me overall. I will add another vote for fixing the compression bugs once MINA has been patched.

I would also be interested in seeing a comment about the future roadmap for Smack? There hasn’t been a whole lot of change to Smack recently, but it seems like it would be worthwhile for Jive to add at least a couple important features per year. Many customers still prefer thick clients over web offerings and the more features available in custom clients using Smack, the more potential customers will be attracted to Openfire. I am still hopeful that HTTP Binding, being the #1 issue, will be scheduled for an upcoming release because it is very important in a corporate environment.

Thanks,

Chris

Hello!

Although overall your support work is really good, I sometimes just wonder, that you guys simply ignore a few things by simply not responding.

How about checking

or

Both seemed to be related to some bugs with dual homed setups.

Also there are many people out there waiting for better group sharing (JM-802 & JM-1025 )

Keep up the good work!

Starry

Hi Gato,

also I prefer bug fixes over new features. One can see that only new features or improvements are within the top 10 issues while the most-voted bug JM-658 with 9 votes is far behind. So I wonder how good the voting results are.

LG

Hey Starry,

I’m sorry that we are missing some issues reported in the forums. That is not something we do on purpose. Truth is that we are trying to cover many fronts at once and we do not always have enough resources to keep up with the community. However, we are doing our best to keep up with the community and at the same time build the best XMPP server around.

Thanks,

– Gato

Hey LG,

The blog post was focused on new features but that does not mean that we will only be working on new features. As always we try to cover as many bug fixes as possible and at the same time include new features whenever possible. If you check out the change log you will see that the balance between them shows that we are doing overall more bug fixes than new features.

Hi Gato,

we have been looking into the external components and have of course noted the security limitations residing in XEP-0114. An implementation of XEP-0225 (even though the specification is experimental) would make the external component solution much more interesting. Has dere been any work on implementing XEP-0225?

Thanks,

Lars