Ignite Realtime Blog

GSoC Project Successfully Completed!

huni — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:05:32 GMT

I am proud to announce that I have successfully completed my Google Summer of Code Project. As we hit the official pencils down date, I thought it might be good to publish results and final toughts.

I started the project in time and completed it 3 working days later than planned, though it could require more effort if we didn't change our goals. I cooperated with Tomas and Tobias to fix the flaws I couldn't notice during development. Changes I made to Openfire and XIFF are listed here and here. All changes have been imported into trunk and hopefully be included in next releases.

It was a wonderful experience to work on Openfire and SparkWeb, especially with my mentor Gaston. Even if my GSoC project is complete, I feel there'll always be something to do for me with Jabber. I am having fun with Jabber, and planning to continue working on Jabber development as a community contributor.

I would like to thank Google for giving me such a great opportunity. I also thank David Smith and Peter Saint-Andre for their excellent support.

See you around!

New Project Lead for SparkWeb & XIFF

ajagucki — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:06:28 GMT

Hey all.

I have been selected as the new project lead for both the SparkWeb and XIFF projects here at the Ignite Realtime community. For about half a year David and I were the only developers contributing code to those projects on a full-time basis -- before SparkWeb's source was even opened up. I added initial support for shared groups, group chat invitations, kick/ban/nick-change announcements in group chat, various bug fixes, and a bunch of other little features here and there. With my previous work on SparkWeb I have seen first hand how its code has matured over the year. I think it is in a 'good' state right now, but clearly there is always room for improvements.

David has made a lot of necessary refactorings in the past that have improved its performance and Safa is currently ensuring SparkWeb is fully compatable with BOSH 1.6. Also, we have various other patches containing excellent improvements from other people in the community that will be included in an upcoming release. These two projects now have a decent amount of activity from outside of Jive, which is great.

From some recent conversations in the weekly chats it is clear to us that people feel comfortable with Openfire, the server -- and that what they are expecting to see is a client evolve to the same degree. I would like to hear more about this perspective so I can focus to make it happen in SparkWeb's use-case.

Interested in getting involved yourself? Well, what are you waiting for? This is an open source community after all... grab the source and join the fun. Send any of your code contributions, ideas, or feedback to me and let's make the most excellent XMPP web app/lib out there!

--Armando

XIFF (and SparkWeb) now support BOSH 1.6

huni — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:50:58 GMT

I have updated the XIFF library to be compatible with BOSH 1.6. As SparkWeb is based on XIFF, most of the information here also applies to SparkWeb. Main good news are:

Login phase and communication using BOSH is noticeably faster thanks to new overactivity rules of 1.6.
BOSH connection is tested and working with Openfire, Tigase and ejabberd.

Additional Work

Added logging support to XIFF using Flex logging API (mx.logging).
Moved SASL logic from XMPPBOSHConnection to XMPPConnection, so now both connection types (BOSH and socket) share the same authentication code. Previously, socket connection was using non-SASL authentication.
Cleaned up some dead code and made BOSH connection class more configurable.
Fixed a few Openfire BOSH issues that appeared when testing XIFF.

Known Issues

This updated version of XIFF will be fully compatible with the updated Openfire and Openfire's BOSH update will be included in version 3.6.x. However, there is an issue with Openfire versions released before the update.

According to XEP-0206, after a successful authentication, clients should send a body with xmpp:restart attribute set to true. But older Openfire versions do not recognize xmpp:restart, handling the request as if it was a polling request. Thus, it responds to the client after 30 seconds.

If you use the updated version of XIFF or SparkWeb with a version of Openfire that does not support BOSH 1.6 (i.e. lower than 3.6), please be aware that you will be experiencing a latency of 30 seconds during logins.