We have made available a new version of the inVerse plugin for Openfire! This plugin allows you to easily deploy the third-party Converse client in Openfire. In this release, the version of the client that is bundled in the plugin is updated to 14.0.1.

The updated plugin should become available for download in your Openfire admin console in the course of the next few hours. Alternatively, you can download the plugin directly, from the plugin’s archive page.

For other release announcements and news follow us on Mastodon or X

On mobile (and worse), baseline XMPP is a little more painful than it should be. It has a lot of round-trips, where the client sends a request and waits - patiently - for the answer before it can continue.

Baseline XMPP actually has 9 of these before you can send and receive messages, and while Openfire has dropped some of these for a while (we’ve supported Direct TLS, for clients, for ever), others haven’t yet made it here. Silly, as I wrote SASL2 some time ago, which is a framework for amortising some of the start-up requests into the authentication.

Others are Bind2 - which pulls resource binding into SASL2 and also allows multiple other “connection setup” things to work - and FAST, which hands out tokens to allow reauthentication which is, well, FAST. This gets us down to 4 round-trips - halving connection time.

Thanks to a supporting grant from the NLNet Foundation, these are now all in our “main” branch, and undergoing their final testing before we make a release, so will be in our nightly builds from now on. I’ve been lucky enough to spend three weeks doing (sometimes literal!) field testing over slow links, so I’ve seen first hand that fortune really favours the bold with these extensions.

We’ve also improved security, with Channel Bindings and Downgrade Protection - also in the nightlies, and added new SCRAM variants like SCRAM-SHA-512-PLUS. Sorry Alexey, we’ve not done the SHA3 variant quite yet, but our FAST implementation does support the new HT2-* family, including the HT2-SHA3- variants.

We even found another round-trip to save, with Initial Authentication Pipelining.

There is also supporting work to make all this happen - like improvements to message archiving, and improvements to our sister project, the XMPP Interop Testing framework, so we can do live testing. This is based on Smack, so that, too now has SASL2, Bind2, and FAST support in its latest Alpha release, 4.6.0-alpha1.

We’d welcome people trying this code out - it’s a lot of exciting new features, and should be highly beneficial to most users of Openfire, and indeed client developers using Smack. It’s still nightlies, not releases, but we’re keen to move this forward as, erm, FAST as we can.

Yeah, I’m not even sorry.

For other release announcements and news follow us on Mastodon or X

The Ignite Realtime community is pleased to announce the release of Openfire 5.1.2, a maintenance update to our open-source XMPP real-time communication server!

This release primarily updates third-party libraries following reports of vulnerabilities in those dependencies. There’s no indication that Openfire itself was vulnerable to any of the reported issues, but as a precaution and to keep our dependencies up to date, we’ve included the updated libraries in this release.

The full changelog has all the details, with 12 items resolved in total.

You can obtain Openfire 5.1.2 for your platform from its download page. The SHA-256 checksums for the release artifacts are:

bbe0e3bd7837aeb6a78a1878b3e23a53a61e99d827ec966ddc40500db416eb86  openfire-5.1.2-1.noarch.rpm
354e14ebf80c03eee05649a43d52338a77797bb41529a4f1486c49e784119f9d  openfire_5.1.2_all.deb
7da2582b4bc6c25640deecd9f22cdc1278c989cd39c0a8832fc15b3aeb208235  openfire_5_1_2.dmg
b32e33bc0e5305dcac308a82447f970b59a095f1edbb425d81ac93203db2f667  openfire_5_1_2.exe
0f45006e319fb36bf869ef9ca3a3bef930a1bd683a792883b0b0b4c9a3974680  openfire_5_1_2.tar.gz
5e52d57fb9e20235ed31a6809c3ecd139fb6583c0b24575cab3459ad4ff0b0a1  openfire_5_1_2_x64.exe
4f2bcdde684ed157f19df8a792db4f907a62864baa8a6c982c970dfaa43d0421  openfire_5_1_2.zip

We’d love to hear from you! Please join our community forum or group chat and let us know what you think!

For other release announcements and news follow us on Mastodon or X