The Ignite Realtime community is happy to announce the release of version 3.8.2 of Openfire! Downloads for various platforms are available here.

Openfire is a real time collaboration (RTC) server licensed under the Open Source Apache license. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.

This release adds BOSH functionality for setting CORS headers and improves Pub-Sub support. There is also a new Atlassian Crowd provider!  Various stability improvements were made as well. The changelog lists these and other changes in more detail.

As always, we welcome your feedback, suggestions, tips, hints, questions and other contributions in the Ignite Realtime Community pages.

The Ignite Realtime community is happy to announce the latest release of Smack (version 3.3).  It is now available for download.  There have been a large number of issues addressed for this release, including new functionality with support for several more protocol extensions (XEP's) and many improvements on existing features.

        New Features

• [SMACK-331] -         Add support for XEP-0184: Message Delivery Receipts
• [SMACK-345] -         Inproved detection of last activity
• [SMACK-361] -         Add support for XEP-0115 Entity Capabilities
• [SMACK-376] -         Setting a custom trust manager to control certificates from outside
• [SMACK-388] -         XEP-199 XMPP Ping support

In addition to these, there have been many bugs fixed and a variety of other tasks done, the complete listing can be viewed here.

For those following the use of Openfire for audio and video communication, The Jitsi project released very recently, the VideoBridge plugin for Openfire. If you use Jitsi with Openfire, you find it very useful for creating both audio and video conferences with multiple people.  I am hoping someone will try and make a Spark plugin for it

In the meantime, I did a quick experiment to see if I could convert the Redfire plugin for Spark to use WebRTC instead of RTMP/RTMFP

Guess what!!. It worked

It works the same way as the Redfire plugin for Spark. Click on the webrtc button to share audio and video with the person you are chatting with. On the other side, that person will receive a prompt to accept or reject the offer.

So here it is attached, if you want to play with it. It does not depend on any Openfire plugin, but will use the JingleNodes plugin if available to relay WebRTC audio/video media when a direct connection cannot be made between two Spark clients..

It needs Google Chrome version 26+ running on the client desktop as the default browser. It supports Google Chrome frame for Internet Explorer. The source code is in there as well. When Firexfox WebRTC support becomes stable, I will probably add support for that too.

*** UPDATE ***

I finally got multi-user video conferencing working in group chat like Redfire. Please note that there is no prompt. Each participant MUST click on the webrtc button to join the video conference and the plugin ensures a webrtc peer-connection is made between each and every participant. This should be done after everyone joins the groupchat.

If a new person enters the room and wishes to join the video-conference, each participant should close their browser windows and click on the webrtc button again.