We are very pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.6.0! It has been a long time coming and may well include the highest number of bug fixes and improvements we've ever had in a single release. Don't quote me on that, but it's certainly the largest number I recall seeing. =) While the bulk of them are bug fixes, there are a couple of big improvements I would like to highlight!
Clearspace Integration Improvements
We've improved upon the integration between Openfire and Clearspace quite a bit. Most are bug fixes and performance improvements, but also some new backend features that further solidify the bond if it is set up. Openfire now includes a Clearspace tab when integration is enabled so help make sure the link is performing properly. On top of that, there are a lot of features in place in preparation for the addition of real time chat support in Clearspace. More information will come on that at a later date. We've also renamed the tables Openfire uses to make it easier to install it alongside other products in the same database, if you so choose. The automatic upgrade procedures will take care of all of the hard work for you, so you shouldn't need to give it a second though.
LDAP Support Improvements
Openfire's LDAP support had some holes in it here and there that should be filled now. Altbasedn, for example, was not used everywhere. There is now support for alias following (or rather, turning it off), paged results (to make sure to get all of the available results instead of a subset), and a number of bug fixes for existing functionality. Internally, a lot of the code has been cleaned up. I still have a couple of things up my sleeve here and there for a future release, but I'm quite pleased with how this is looking now.
Multiple Conference Services
Every wished you could have more than one conference service set up with different rules? Maybe you wanted one for public access with no room creation rules and restrictions, but also wanted an internal "protected" service that abided by strict rules. Maybe you just wanted to set up some sort of specialized set. Maybe you never wanted -any- conference services and just wanted to delete them. Whatever the reason you might have, you can now set up as many or as little as you want. In some cases, plugins may even be able to take advantage of a specialized service setup.
BOSH (HTTP Binding) Improvements
With many thanks to our Google Summer of Code student, Safa Sofuoglu, we now have updated BOSH 1.6 support, and a ton of misc bug fixes and improvements. Improvements in this area were also performed on the connection managers! I encourage you all to read about it in his report:
GSoC 2008 Report: Openfire and SparkWeb
More Configuration in Database
The openfire.xml config file was getting bloated and a lot of the configuration in it could easily have been moved into the database. As a result, we've moved just about everything that doesn't fall into a category of:
- how to connect to the database itself
- config info specific to host itself
Why you might ask? In a clustered environment, it makes it so you can set Openfire up once and now have to reconfigure the providers and such for each cluster member individually. It also paves the way for support for things like, admins stored in the database, which means you can update the admin list on the fly, instead of having to edit openfire.xml and then restart the server.
Plugin Updates
It's important to update the following plugins to account for changes in the 3.6.0 API:
- User Search
- IM Gateway
- Fastpath
- Monitoring
Where Do I Get It?
You can download Openfire 3.6.0 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.6.0 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.
Sounds great
Questions/Issues:
1. All links in the "Where Do I Get It?"-section are dead.
2. You mention some API changes in 3.6.0. What about a special section in changelog where all API changes are listed. This would help plugin developers as me a lot.
3. Does upgrading Openfire automatically move settings from openfire.xml to database?