Taking SparkWeb forward

A while back, I volunteered to lead development of SparkWeb as a consequence of the work I have done with a commercial version of SparkWeb which was based on the red5 version in the old red5 plugin for Openfire. It has a number of interesting new features which include plugin architecture, audio/video support in 2-way chats, server-side mixed audio in multi-user chat rooms, a softphone phone with multi-line support, desktop screen sharing and activity streams incorporating public streams from Twitter/Facebook as well as internal streams using XMPP pub-sub.

Unfortunately, the memory footprint of this version is too large (200MB+) and I am very reluctant to push development of SparkWeb in that direction.

To reduce the footprint, I am considering the following:

  • Drop XIFF and turn Redfire in to a Connection Manager and use AMF to call Openfire methods directly from Flash and vice-versa.

  • Use a single encrypted RTMPE connection with multiplexed audio, video and remote method invocations for each SparkWeb client.

Of course, this would mean that SparkWeb would become tightly bound to Openfire and Redfire, but it could reduce the memory footprint dramatically and would also cut out the cross-domain and security issues associated with opening socket connections in Flash, consequently making the same code usable in a web browser and a desktop application with minor changes.

There is another SparkWeb client that I am also working on which is HTML5 compatible and based on the old Jive Software HTML SparkWeb and uses a BOSH connection with the unreleased Jive Spank JavaScript library. As I am trying to get it to work on my iPad, I am tempted to rename it as SparkPad. I am not making much progress with this version, so I hope by releasing it, someone else can finish it off.

1 Like

I was going to post this as a blog on the main container page, but someone has taken away my blogging rights. Is this deliberate?

Dele.

It wasn’t intentional. Bugs galore with this SBS system and blogging permissions. Will try to figure it why…

daryl

I’m thinking, what if some users (or developers) would want to stay with XIFF? Maybe we should leave SW project as is and create new one like “SparkWeb AMF (SWA)” in Jira and SVN?

As about your HTML5 version you are probably referring to SparkWeb Ajax (SWEB)? In Jira it still shows Alex Wenckus as a Lead, but probably he is not working on this anymore. Or is your version completely different? If not, we can just make you the Lead of this project too. We can send an email to Alex about this.

I am an active user of XIFF myself for various other projects, but as it is, there is a considerable amount of work to make the org.jivesoftware.xiff version used in SparkWeb compatible with org.igniterealtime.xiff version and I am not convinced that the results are worth the effort. I would rather use an alternative to XIFF if it had positive benefits which RTMPE does have.

I was thinking of a new project name too like “SparkFlash” or something :slight_smile:

Yes, the HTML5 version is a fork of the work done by Alex Wenckus in the old comercial enterprise plugin. I have removed the dependencies of the enterprise plugin container and my code is probably very much out of sync with the original. I am not even sure the original source code is available on the igniterealtime SVN as it was never released. I spoke to Matt Tucker a while ago about it and he gave me permission to release my version as open source.

Thanks Daryl. Please let me know if you do :slight_smile:

I would still like to get this to the attention of the wider community for more feedback

This is SparkWeb (Ajax).

I am not planning on supporting it or developing it any further. I am releasing it in the hope of someone finding it useful.

The easiest way of using it with Openfire 3.7.0 is to unzip to the OPENFIRE_HOME/\resources\spank folder and access it from a web page with http://your_server:7070/ or unzip to a sub-folder called sparkweb under the spank folder and access with http://your_server:7070/sparkweb
sparkweb.zip (1326311 Bytes)

Dele, i suggest to create a doc in Sparkweb forum and copy your last post in there.

Thanks, I have just done that :slight_smile:

Hi Dele,

Please try again… It should have been working before, but I am not sure what SBS does sometimes.

daryl

No Joy :frowning:

Not to worry, I have taken wroot’s advice and will post in the SparkWeb forum

Image1.jpg

Flash SparkWeb development is still active

This is a screenshot of the commercial version of Flash SparkWeb I did. The open source version will have most of the features, but may have a different look.

Is there any ETA on when the open source version will be released and with what features and what not? Appreciate all the work you and everyone else do around here!

We are making slow but good progress. See http://community.igniterealtime.org/message/210883#210883