I am working on BOSH support of Openfire and SparkWeb as part of the Google Summer of Code 2008. As we got past the midterm evaluations, my mentor Gaston and I thought it would be good to inform the community about what I have done so far.

My proposal involved updating and improving Openfire's BOSH support by updating the implementation to BOSH 1.6, and migrating Apache MINA as its connection provider.

I started with creating a load test environment to see Openfire's current performance, and created a document explaining how to use it. Then I ran some load tests using that environment. Unfortunately, the test machines I used were not enough to produce desired results.

As the next part of the project, I updated Openfire's BOSH to support both 1.5 and 1.6. Here is a summary of the update:

• Added 'hold' and 'ver' attributes to the session creation response.

• Fixed version checking. Before it was done using a double variable, which  may show that 1.5 is newer than 1.10.

• Script syntax support has already been added before. Finetuned it to prevent  caching of responses.

• Implemented in-order message forwarding (JM-1412), because further work seemed to be depend on this implementation. This is the part that took most of my time, also which made me to get more familiar with the code  after long debugging sessions.

• Implemented acknowledgements, which was intoduced in version 1.6.

• Added support for session pauses, which was also new for 1.6.

• Implemented overactivity checking. In 1.5, there was only 'polling  too-frequently error', and a little description about it. Version 1.6 introduced a new section for overactivity, and has a detailed description of which  circumstances should be considered overactivity.

With this update, I have seen that some BOSH issues I was not aware of (JM-1245, JM-1246) have also been resolved. The update has been merged into Openfire trunk, so you can grab and test it.

After the update, I started to investigate how to migrate to Apache MINA, and found out that it would be harder than we expected, because the version used by Openfire, 1.x, did not have any http support. We had also other alternatives, like Grizzly, so we deferred the decision about connection providers until we do some tests on them.

I am currently working on SparkWeb to make it fully compatible with BOSH 1.6. In the meantime, I am cooperating with Tomas Karasek, who is developing BOSH for Gajim, to resolve any BOSH related issues in Openfire.

I am open to any ideas/suggestions.