We’re planning on migrating the community back-end for Igniterealtime.org from Jive Forums to Clearspace on Wednesday. I’m pretty excited about the change, but it will require a couple of hours of downtime on the site. I’ll post a more specific outage estimate in the forums as Wednesday approaches. If you’re interested in getting a preview of what the updated site will look like, check out http://beta.igniterealtime.org.
OSCON 2007 is wrapping up and it was a great conference. Yesterday I gave a talk about Jingle, an extension to XMPP (Jabber) that’s primarily used for VoIP. The slides are available on Slideshare (including a link to download the Powerpoint).
At the beginning of the week, we participated in the XMPP Devcon event. Peter provided details about the topics of discussion from day one and day two on his blog.
I wanted to let everyone know that Jive Software just launched a beta of Jivespace, our new developer community on dev.jivesoftware.com
This is the place where developers can collaborate around Clearspace, Clearspace X, and Jive Forums products. You will also notice that the Community tab takes you to an area for collaboration that is powered by our Clearspace X product. This developer environment is currently in Beta, so you may notice a few minor issues. Feel free to point them out in the Jivespace Lounge, and we will fix them as soon as we can!
This new developer community does not impact Ignite Realtime in any way. Collaboration on real time communication / XMPP related products will continue on igniterealtime.org, and there are no plans to change this. Jivespace just gives developers a place to collaborate on Jive Software’s other products.
The login information is integrated with our Jive store and Support forums on jivesoftware.com, so existing Jive login information (but not Ignite Realtime logins) should work on the new Jivespace site.
We’re making progress on the migration of the community from forums to Clearspace X. A beta version of the Ignite site using the new platform is available at beta.igniterealtime.org. Clearspace carries forward the discussion functionality, while also giving us blogging and wiki document features. The beta site is using a copy of the forums data from a couple of weeks back. Please poke around and feel free to post test data, then give us your feedback. When we do the final migration, it will be using the most recent real content.
Want to come to Portland for XMPP Devcon or OSCON without spending money on travel? Have a cheap boss who won’t foot the bill?
If you want Jive Software to pay for your travel, you just need to win the OSCON Trip Give-A-Way Contest by creating the best blog entry about how Clearspace, Jive Forums, Openfire and/or Spark have helped your organization. Your blog should be entertaining and creative while describing how you’ve used Jive software to make your organization better in some way.
All of the details and fine print can be found on the Jive Talks blog.
Like many other people I tend to use instant messaging on a lot of different workstations: at home, at work, on my notebook and sometimes from abroad using the Jeti Applet. With the current generation of mobile phones, even these devices offer decent support for IM.
This all works very well with one major drawback: the history of my chats is spread around different machines (or completely lost when using web based or mobile clients) and whenever I need to look up something it’s more often than not unavailable on the machine I am currently working on. This situation reminds me of the old days before I switched my email store to a central IMAP server and used POP3 for email download. With Instant Messaging becoming more and more important I feel the need for a similar central archive for my IM chats.
For Openfire there are some archiving features available in the enterprise edition and a few external open source plugins with similar goals. They are logging messages as they pass the server and provide a web interface for message retrieval.
This is already an improvement but still a bit off the solution I am dreaming of. I would really like to have the message archive integrated within my Jabber client just like they are now with the only difference being that the messages are retrieved from the server instead of the local filesystem.
It turned out that I am not alone with that vision. There is XEP-0136: Message Archiving a proposed XMPP extension for server side message archiving. The XEP supports configuration of which messages to archive, automatic and manual archving, encryption and message retrival.
Support for XEP-0136 by servers and clients is still in a very early stage, although the first version of XEP-0136 appeared three years ago. To overcome the hen and egg problem I’ve started working on “Open Archive” which already implements the basic features:
- Automatic Message Archiving
- Message Retrieval
So what’s next?
Well we must add support for XEP-0136 to the clients. A good point to start is Spark.
And of course we will add the missing features, manual archiving and preferences are on the agenda for upcoming releases.
Finally, XEP-0136 currently does not specify how to perform a server side search in the archive. Open Archive already supports searching but due to that limitation only through the Web UI. So we will start a discussion within the XMPP community on how this feature can be standardized and made available to clients.
Open Archive is available under GPL v2: Try it.
Jive Software has been providing free collaboration software to open source projects for a while, and we are now expanding this program to other software developer user groups (JUGs, etc.) We have also simplified the application making it easier for open source projects and user groups to get a free license.
The free license can be used with Clearspace, Clearspace X, and Jive Forums for use in open source projects and developer user groups. This is our way of supporting software developers working for non-commercial purposes. Collaboration is a critical part of most software development projects. Many developers devote time and energy to projects without any commercial compensation, and we want them to have tools that make it easier for them to collaborate. This is not a free trial. The licenses are free for as long as the project wants to use the software.
To qualify for a free developer license:
- The project or group must be related to software development.
- It must be primarily non-commercial.
- Open source projects must use an OSI approved open source license, have a publicly accessible code base, and have a publicly accessible application.
- User groups must have a public community.
- Note: non-profit or non-commercial projects unrelated to software development are not eligible for the free developer licenses.
Use our new, simplified online forms to apply:
I hope to see a bunch of projects take us up on this offer!
We (Jive Software) launched Clearspace X just about one month ago, our external community software product that combines discussions, wiki documents and blogging. [As an aside, we provide free Clearspace X licenses to Open Source projects.] So, why aren’t we using it here on igniterealtime.org yet? There’s lots of good excuses, but we’ve been hard at work on the migration and it will happen soon. What will the change to Clearspace X mean?
- The same discussions functionality we have with Jive Forums, but with an updated UI.
- Migration of the blog engine to the Clearspace platform (this will be fairly transparent).
- A rich new set of functionality around wiki documents. We’re already planning lots of great content.
We’re looking forward to the new features and to getting your feedback on them. I’ll post more migration details in the forums soon.
You may remember me asking for everyone’s help a few months back to vote for Openfire. We’re entered in the Enterprise Open Source Reader’s Choice Award in the “Best Open Source Product” category. The deadline for voting is May 31, which is just one week away. If you haven’t already voted, please visit the site to cast your vote. Note that the voting process started before the rename of the server, which is why you’ll see the old Wildfire name.
The good news is that we’re in the lead position with 198 votes. But other projects aren’t far behind and I’d be thrilled to solidify our lead and hit at least 250 votes. Thanks for your help!
After this many years, most web developers have become a little numb to how much Microsoft Internet Explorer is holding back the web. We whine about it, we drop by Position Is Everything to find the appropriate hack to use, and we go about our business. Recently, working on SparkWeb has really brought the issue back into focus for me.
Shortly before SparkWeb 1.0 came out, we realized that it wasn’t working in Internet Explorer 7… sometimes. There was no discernible pattern to the failures; some were on XP, some on Vista, some were one sub-version of 7, some were another. After a great deal of painstaking debugging I eventually tracked down the problem. XML support (and by extension the XMLHTTPRequest feature used in “ajax”) in Internet Explorer is provided by a system library, rather than built directly into the application. This wouldn’t be too bad, except different versions are installed on different systems. Currently MSXML3 and 6 are the best choices. 3 is incredibly widely deployed, and 6 is the latest and greatest. We chose 6… IE7 chose 3. Boom.
[Graph courtesy of Alan Foreman]
That issue is fixed now, but it reminded me again of just what we’re missing. Here’s a brief list of stuff that works in the big 3 (Mozilla, Safari, Opera), but not in IE6, and in many cases not in IE7:
- position: fixed
Useful for making navigation bars and such always available so users don’t have to scroll back up to them. Also allows for things like Eric Meyer’s beautiful ComplexSpiral design. This is fixed in IE7. - border-radius
Part of the in-progress CSS3 specification, but still pretty well supported these days. It allows for painless rounded corners, without the crazy hacks we use now. - XHTML
I’m slightly skeptical of the usefulness of this one, but it’s a pretty big deal to some people. IE will not accept XHTML unless it’s told that it’s HTML instead of XML. This leads to pages that have subtle hard-to-find bugs when switched over to real XML parsing. - XMLHTTPRequest
This one “works” in IE6, but only through ActiveX. If the user has ActiveX disabled (say, for security reasons, as Microsoft did in IE7) then it will stop working. This is fixed in IE7. - CSS child selectors
Generally useful in all sorts of layouts - Translucent PNG images
Again, hugely useful. There’s a hack to allow them in IE6, but it can break a bunch of other things… as we found out when trying to use it in SparkWeb. Even in IE7 there are a number of nasty bugs involving this functionality. - :hover on anything other than links
Useful for popup menus, button hover effects, tooltips, and any number of other things. This is fixed in IE7. - Modifying stylesheets via javascript
Basically every major browser gets this one wrong in some ways. I’ve found it’s best to just forget that the possibility exists and use inline styles instead. - SVG and canvas
These are the shiny new ways of making complex images and animations on the web. Canvas is a simple javascript-driven system for drawing, and SVG is a complex vector image format based on XML that also supports animation and a number of other things.
This is just a selection of major issues, there are many many smaller issues, many issues that have slipped my mind, and many places where IE isn’t the only browser messing up. Microsoft claims that they will be making a big push to catch up on compliance with modern web standards in Internet Explorer 8. Even if that’s true though, the legacy of stagnation from five years of IE6 will be difficult and time consuming to overcome.
However, there is some hope; People like Dean Edwards, Jack Slocum, the Prototype team, and many others are building libraries to work around browser issues and provide a common platform to build web applications on. Also, the newly re-formed HTML working group is pushing forward towards HTML5 with some wonderful people involved, including key participants from Apple, Google, Opera, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Unlike previous web standards efforts, the HTML process is open to anyone who’s interested. Ian Hickson has instructions on joining the process here
