Earlier today I exported our svn repository for SparkWeb and committed the intial import to the new open source repository! Instructions for getting and building the source are available. Getting and Building SparkWeb. A chat room for discussion of SparkWeb development can be found at sparkweb@conference.igniterealtime.org. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community can do!

David recently blogged about how XMPP is Taking Over the World starting with the recent AOL tests and his hopes that Microsoft, Yahoo, and QQ would follow AOL's lead.

Well, this must have got Matt thinking about how XMPP really could take over the world. His vision of XMPP is moving way past IM with a grand vision for how XMPP could be the future of cloud services.

I'll let you read his entire post over on Jive Talks, but here is a little snippet:

Openfire is the award-winning instant messaging server known for its simplicity, elegance, performance and extensibility. With each new major release, scalability has been improved; however, being able to scale a lot without redundancy or high availability poses a risk to every connected user if the single server goes down.

After many months of work that risk is now part of the history. Openfire Enterprise 3.4.0 provides support for clustering. Clustering will let you run Openfire on several machines serving the same XMPP domain. Clustering can be enabled with just one click from the admin console. Machines running Openfire Enterprise will automatically meet between them to form a cluster. With clustering you not only get high availability but also improved scalability. In our internal load tests, we got more than half a million concurrent connections sending lots of packets in a cluster of just 2 nodes.

Another nice addition to Openfire Enterprise is SparkWeb. Users can now connect to the server and chat from your website. Read the SparkWeb: Next Generation blog post for more information.

On the open source side we also have excellent news. More than 30 new features and more than 30 bugs were fixed. Personal Eventing via Pubsub was added so you can now publish your geo-location, music you are listening to and let subscribers be alerted. From the admin console you can manage users roster. Moreover, it is now possible to retrieve photos from LDAP and use them as users avatars. The complete set of changes can be found here.

You can download Openfire from here. Openfire Enterprise can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy,

Openfire Team

Monday, after a long period of heavy development, I finally put out version 1.1.0 of the IM Gateway plugin! A total of 85 issues from JIRA were closed along the way and I'm quite pleased with the results. Along the way there were a number of stumbling blocks where I would just about be ready to release and something major would come up, and I certainly did not want to release anything with serious issues going on. As development continued, more and more features became interesting to me and were implemented. Since 1.0's release, I've had a number of helpful folk step up and offer patches, testing, code, translations, and help with libraries I depend on. I want to take a moment to thank everyone who contributed in any way! You are all invaluable to me! There are a number of big plans coming for the next major release, but I wanted to highlight some of the things from 1.1.0's release and even comment on some of it!

First off, there's XMPP/Google Talk support. One might ask, why do you want XMPP support when there's s2s? That's a question that's been fought many times in the past and typically results in nothing being decided. Well I decided to implement it and then another helpful person (thanks Mehmet!) took my piddly start with it and turned it into a full on transport for the plugin. After implementing it I found myself using it with some accounts I had seen no reason to add to my Adium X config but decided hey, if I can handle it server side, then I'll just carry it around with me. Has been working out really well!

Then there's Gadu-Gadu support. This is a protocol I did not expect to ever implement. Why? Everything about it is Polish. I couldn't find my way around the web site enough to even download a copy of the client. However, I said early on that if someone would translate or help me download or generally help me get it set up and there was a good API out there, I'd do it. So thanks to Marcin for stepping up and helping me get this started! The API itself was amazingly enough the easiest API to work with yet!

And what about SIMPLE support? Thanks to Ravin and Patrick for writing this support as I wouldn't have even known where to begin! I still don't understnad SIP/SIMPLE. Who knows if I ever will. But the transport sure works with my OpenSER server! I'm hoping some folk will take a look at it so I can get a feel for what it does and does not work with and maybe I can work with them to tweak it to work correctly with various implementations.

Another interesting thing that was added is an XMLRPC interface so site administrators can write their own web front ends for users to register with the various transports. That way folk could use some various standard web look and feel for the registration, and/or their own authentication mechanism, or even just something they consider "nicer" for their users, and dodge around typical requirements of registering through a client or requiring the admin to do it for them.

A lot of the inner workings of the plugin were redone, making things a lot more efficient in terms of network traffic and overall coding structure. I don't know that anyone but me will appreciate the reworkings of the code, but hey. =)

One of the interesting things that came about is that I ended up as the lead developer for Martyr, a very cool IRC library. IRClib just wasn't getting it done for me so I tried out Martyr, adored it's structure, and offered to help improve it. It's already led to a far better IRC transport than what I had before.

Beyond that I want to thank the folk from nimbuzz for creating the wonderful project OpenYMSG (a fork of YMSG) that fixes a number of problems I kept running into in the past! Through their improvements Yahoo support in the IM Gateway plugin was promoted to being considered stable! On top of that they've helped me out some with JML, the library that handles MSN support. Great work folk!

Well that's enough of me, I'm excited about things to come though and I hope you all will join me in that excitement and continue to help me with testing, ideas, and whatever! =)

Have you made your reservations to attend XMPP DevCon and the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) this July in Portland, OR? It may seem a bit early to be thinking about conferences in late July, but hotels will fill up quickly in Portland with so many events converging around OSCON (July 23-27). Not only are we planning DevCon for July 23-24, but Ubuntu Live will also be in town July 22-24.

Roughly twice a year, the XMPP community holds a DevCon event to discuss protocol changes, do interop testing, and to socialize in real life. The last event was in Belgium along with Fosdem in February. The February meeting included discussions about certification programs, file transfer issues, Jingle, protocol developments, end to end encryption support (extensions), personal event pubsub, message archiving, and more.

Discussion topics for DevCon in July will likely include continued discussion on many of the topics above plus spim prevention, simultaneous XML editing (for whiteboarding etc.), clarifications to rfc3920bis, and more. Any developers working on XMPP servers, clients, code libraries, or related applications are welcome to attend. Since many of you in the Ignite Realtime community fit into this group, it would be great to see you attend DevCon.

Jive Software will, of course, be out in full force for XMPP DevCon and OSCON, since they are right in our hometown of Portland, OR. At OSCON, I will be on a panel discussing the Art of Community and Matt Tucker will be leading a session called Jingle: Cutting Edge Open Source VoIP. Matt is also planning some cool stuff for DevCon. Last year during OSCON, we held a great party, BeerForge, and we plan to do something similar again this year!



We hope to see many Ignite Realtime community members at these events! It is a great way to meet some of the people face to face that we collaborate with over email, IM, and other online environments.