Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Whack and SparkWeb have graduated. Help me congratulate them!

dombiak_gaston — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:47:01 GMT

Whack 1.0 has been released. Whack is our Open Source XMPP (Jabber) component library for XMPP components. External components are processes that run outside of the Openfire's process but can connect to the server to register new XMPP service. Whack is an implementation of XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol.

Unlike the other igniterealtime products, Whack followed a different evolution path. We started coding Whack around November 2004 and after a few months it was operational. Openfire and Whack share the same component's API so around 2005 we were able to run Fastpath as an internal component (i.e. running in the Openfire's process) or just move it as an external component using Whack. It was impressive seeing the same code running as internal and external. Since then Whack continued to evolve but always at a very slow pace. Whack was always stable in each step but it was just not ready for prime time. We wanted to keep adding more things to it to reach a 1.0 release. Since our collaboration software Clearspace uses Whack to integrate with Openfire we needed to push the boundaries of Whack once again and I'm happy to say that we now reached the 1.0 release. And that is why we decided to make a public release in 2008 after 4 years of continuous but slow growth.

A few months ago we also released a new product called SparkWeb. SparkWeb is our Open Source web-based IM client. SparkWeb is based on XIFF just like Spark is based on Smack. Today we updated the products page to list SparkWeb as an official product. Welcome SparkWeb! The family has grown a little bit now.

You can get Whack from here. Questions could be posted to the Whack forum.

SparkWeb can be downloaded from here. If you want to build from the source code you can read the Getting and Building SparkWeb document.

Webchat client of Fastpath is now available

dombiak_gaston — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:53:37 GMT

The Fastpath product allows a company to provide support through the web. Users can use their own XMPP client or the provided web client to initiate a chat request. The request will be routed to the proper queue and agents will be offered the chance to answer the request.

Today we made the source code of the web client part of Fastpath available and a new version was released with the change in the license. You can download the new version from the plugins page.

Use the following SVN access to get the source code of the web client:

svn co http://svn.igniterealtime.org/svn/repos/fastpath/webchat/trunk webchat

The web chat client relies on the workgroup API that has not been moved to the open source repository yet. That is our last task in this long process of making Fastpath open source.

Enjoy,

-- Gato

New open source plugins with enterprise features are now available

dombiak_gaston — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:24:46 GMT

It took us some time but we finally made it. The Enterprise Edition plugin has been broken into smaller open source plugins as mentioned in the Turning Openfire Enterprise into an open source product blog post.

The new plugins can be found here:

Monitoring Service (released on Apr 24, 2008)
Fastpath Service (released on Apr 24, 2008)
Clustering Plugin (released on May 6, 2008)
Client Control (released on May 13, 2008)

With these new plugins the total number of official open source plugins is now 17. If we add the clustering plugin that is commercial and the 3 beta plugins that includes the popular Red5 plugin the total number of plugins comes up to 21. Finally, more plugins can be found in the Non-Jive Openfire Plugins document.

Enjoy,

The Openfire Team

Flash-based Audio in Openfire part II

dele — Fri, 02 May 2008 12:59:46 GMT

Just over a year ago, I blogged about using audio and video with openfire. At that time, I implemented a SIP based softphone in Adobe Flash using AsteriskWin32 and VAC4. My argument for an open-source, standards based, no-install web-based softphone as a requirement for Web 2.0 voice applications is still valid today and the emergence of Ribbit, TringMe, Zingaya (Flashphone) and others confirmed my thinking was not isolated.

It has however been a disappointment that all implementations I have encountered to-date have been closed, proprietary and inaccessible for integration (both client and server).

The latest release of the Red5 Plugin for Openfire features a completely open-source implementation of a web-based SIP softphone written in Flex3 and should work on both Windows and Linux. It uses MjSIP as the SIP user agent in the plugin and should work with most SIP proxies, but I have only tested with Asterisk. I have also only tested 2 simultaneous users, but there is no limit and will depend on how many users and media streams Red5 can cope with before it dies. Each telephone conversation consumes 2 user RTMP connections and 4 audio streams on Red5. All source code is provided and you are free to use it in your Openfire Red5 Plugin applications. Just confirm that the open-source licenses of MjSIP and Nelly2PCM are to your liking.

I have also integrated the softphone into SparkWeb and the Openfire SIP plugin. This will enable a user to make SIP calls from Spark and SparkWeb with the same user profile. The old Red5gateway will be depreciated and in a later release for window users, I will be adding AsteriskWin32 to the plugin and provide a complete SIP solution for Openfire.

As usual, any feedback will be appreciated.

For details of how this works read on.....

The red5Phone Flex3 client makes a NetConnection with the Red5 SIP application. When it recieves a success response, it makes a remote "open" method call in the Red5 SIP application which creates a pair of SIPUser and RTMPUser objects for that user and instructs SIPUser to register the user with the specified SIP proxy. When the NetConnection is closed by the Flex3 client, the pair of objects are destroyed and the user is unregistered from the SIP proxy.

When the Flex3 client invokes "call" remotely, SIPUser starts a SIP outgoing call with the SIP proxy and exchanges RTP audio streams. It invokes "connected" on the Flex3 client and informs it of what stream names Flex3 client should use to publish from the PC microphone and play to the PC speaker. It then resamples the incoming audio RTP packets from 8KHZ to 11KHZ, converts from ulaw to ADPCM and calls a method in the RTMPUser object to publish the audio to Red5 using the same name it gave to the Flex3 client to play.

The RTMPUser objects also plays the stream being published by the Flex3 client which is in the Nellymoser ASAO codec. It calls asao2ulaw (my modified version of the open source nelly2pcm) to convert the packets to ulaw and pass to SIPUser through a PipedOutputStream.

An incoming call follows the same pattern, the incoming SIP signal appears as a remote "incoming" call on the flex3 client. The user can then pickup the call and the Red5phone Flex3 client remotely calls "accept" in SIPUser to accept the call. The audio is setup the same way as an outgoing call.

Open-Even-More-Fire 3.5.1 Released!

jadestorm — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:29:59 GMT

We are pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.5.1, now with even more openness! This release represents the first stage of the Enterprise plugin split into open source plugins. We're very excited to be able to provide these to everyone for free, and seeing what the community does with them, both in terms of contributed code and use case scenarios. So lets talk about some specifics.

New Plugins!

Monitoring: Adds support for server statistics and chat archiving and reports.
Fastpath: Support for managed queued chat requests, such as a support team might use.

These are the first two pieces of the open sourced Enterprise plugin. Client management is coming very soon, as is clustering. SparkWeb will also be released tomorrow as a separate product. So you might be wondering, hey, why is there an Openfire Enterprise 3.5.1? Well, due to the lack of all of the plugins being available right now, we've provide 3.5.1 for existing enterprise customers to make use of. It includes some important clustering fixes though! (as will the clustering plugin when it is release)

Important, Seriously, Pay Attention, Read This

If you install the Monitoring and/or Fastpath plugin, make absolute sure that you read the readme first! There are included instructions for how to migrate your database from the Enterprise plugin to the new plugin database tables. If you have ever run the Enterprise plugin or the old Fastpath plugin before it was integrated with Enterprise, make sure you don't forget this or you will be unhappy!

Big Connection Manager Improvements

The connection managers have been updated to bring HTTP binding up to date and a couple of library upgrades that include a number of improvements. It is important to note though that the conf/manager.xml file has been updated and you will need to update yours as well. The new http binding section that you will need to add is described here.

Ok Fine, Where Do I Get It?

You can download Openfire 3.5.1 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.5.1 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.

SparkWeb Open Source

DavidSmith — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:40:51 GMT

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!

Openfire is Lookin' Hot!

jadestorm — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:14:30 GMT

As you may have already seen, Openfire 3.5.0 was released today alongside it's good friend Clearspace 2.0! We are excited to put out this release as it strolls alongside a number of new announcements, new features, and is sporting a brand new outfit in the form of a new look and feel for the admin interface.

Now, in light of the announcements regarding the Enterprise plugin becoming open source, you may be wondering why you can see an updated Enterprise plugin available. We are providing this plugin for our existing enterprise customers until the separate split-up plugins are released. Those of you waiting for the open source releases, please stay tuned!

For our Clearspace customers, this new version of Openfire integrates at a much more intense level than before. Instead of simply providing presence to Clearspace, and requiring you to point both Clearspace and Openfire at something like LDAP to have the same login setup, you can now have Openfire speak directly to Clearspace. It will pull it's users and groups, as well as pass authentication through Clearspace. Setup is a breeze, as you have one screen of setup in Clearspace and one screen of setup in Openfire and you are done. And we're not stopping there. Future releases will include even more integrations between the two!

Is Clearspace integration the only new thing in Openfire 3.5.0? Of course not! We've now got the ability to disable accounts, security audit logs for admin events, easy to take advantage of invisibility, and did I mention the pretty new admin interface? We went over a lot of these new features in a previous blog post, so I won't bore you with a complete rehash of all of them.

One word of warning, due to the nature of CSS not wanting to easily refresh itself, you may need to shift-reload in your browser for the new admin console to look correct. And don't forget to update your plugins after upgrading to 3.5.0! Some of them are affected by API changes! (specifically: User Search, IM Gateway, MOTD, and SIP)

This has been a very exciting day for us here at Jive and we hope exciting for you as well!

You can download Openfire 3.5.0 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.5.0 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.

Turning Openfire Enterprise into an open source product

dombiak_gaston — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:56:50 GMT

We're in the process of making the Openfire Enterprise module Open Source (see Matt's blog). The Enterprise module provided several areas of functionality that were available as a single plugin. A quick list:

Reporting - a dashboard with statistics about server load, user sessions, chats, groupchats, etc. and support for executing reports.
Chat archiving - support for tracking conversations taking place on the server. Both one-to-one and groupchat conversations can be archived.
SparkWeb client - the web-based version of the successful Spark client.
Clustering - support for running several machines hosting the same domain. Thus adding fail-over and better scalability of the server.
Client control - controls whether certain features are available or not in the Spark client (e.g. file transfer, broadcast, groupchat, etc.). Moreover, it is also possible to specify which clients can connect to the server, push new versions of the Spark client and populate rosters with groupchat bookmarks.
Fastpath - provides rich web-based click-to-chat functionality with support for requests to the best available operator in queues. It's ideal for web-based realtime helpdesks.

Turning a commercial product into an open source product implies more effort that one would initially estimate. Therefore, we are going to break this process in two stages. During the first stage we will offer several plugins that will include the features listed above (with the exception of clustering). Our clustering solution relies on a commercial product and will not be made Open Source. The output of the first phase will be:

Reporting and Chat transcripts plugin - this plugin will include the reporting and chat transcript functionalities
SparkWeb - SparkWeb will be available as a separate project and not as an Openfire plugin
Client Control plugin - the ability to manage clients will be available as an Openfire plugin
Fastpath plugin - the Fastpath application will be composed of an Openfire plugin and the WebChat plugin. The webchat.war plugin can be deployed to Openfire as a plugin or can be deployed to your application server (e.g. Tomcat) of choice.

The second stage of this process will include:

Reporting and chat archiving - This functionality was available as a plugin in stage one. For stage two we will evaluate making it part of the server itself.

Stage one is planned for April 27th, 2008. That means that two weeks from now we will have most of the functionality included in the enterprise edition available as open source plugins. No clear date has been assigned to stage two but it should take place a few months after stage one.

Openfire Enterprise is becoming Open Source

matt — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 03:56:29 GMT

I'm happy to announce that we're making most of Openfire Enterprise Open Source! First, a bit of context: for the past couple of years, one way that we (Jive Software) have monetized our Open Source work on Openfire and the other projects on igniterealtime.org has been through Openfire Enterprise. Openfire Enterprise addresses the Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) market by adding rich reporting, archiving, and control features on top of Openfire. Since we released Clearspace last year, Jive has become super-focused on social collaboration and communities. That's pretty different than the EIM market and it's become increasingly difficult for us to serve both markets with our limited resources. Instead, we want to focus our Openfire work on real-time social and collaborative features and monetize our Open Source efforts through Clearspace integrations.

Existing Customers

Discontinuing a commercial product is always a difficult decision and one of our biggest concerns is not leaving existing customers in a lurch. We'll continue to provide support for Openfire Enterprise through existing support contracts and believe that making the Enterprise components Open Source is the best possible outcome for customers given the options. We remain strongly committed to the Openfire project and are pretty excited about what's coming in the future.

A Few Details

Gato will have a follow-up blog post with a lot more details about what we're releasing as Open Source and how, but I wanted to highlight two items. Sparkweb is our flex-based web client based on XIFF and will become Open Source. The client is already very feature rich and polished, and we're actively making many code improvements to it, as it's a shared code base with the real-time client features we're building into Clearspace. Second, the clustering functionality in Enterprise will not be made Open Source. Part of the reason for this is that we use a third-party commercial library for clustering that can't be Open-sourced.

Let's Go Get 'em

One of our hopes with this move is that the last possible objection to deploying XMPP-based instant messaging at every organization in the world is now removed. Now, everyone will have access to an open standards solution that satisfies all the needs of IT departments... for free. We think that's great news for the community and getting our technology deployed even more widely is good for Jive Software as well. We hope you'll join us in spreading the word.

XIFF 3 Beta

DavidSmith — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:32:20 GMT

I'm happy to announce that we've just released an initial beta of XIFF 3.0, our open source ActionScript library for building XMPP clients. Continuing along the path set by Sean and the previous developers of XIFF, we've moved to embrace ActionScript 3 and Flex, while adding significant functionality improvements at the same time. Highlights include BOSH support, VCard support, and redesigned APIs. Feedback is strongly requested; It has been quite a while since a XIFF release, and a lot of things have changed, so I will be interested to see how the community feels about the direction we've taken things.

Some parts of this new release are still in a transitional stage. For example, SASL support is only available for BOSH connections at the moment. As more code is generalized between the BOSH and Socket connections, this limitation will go away.