Openfire Unleashed

dombiak_gaston — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:06:32 GMT

Openfire is the award-winning instant messaging server known for its simplicity, elegance, performance and extensibility. With each new major release, scalability has been improved; however, being able to scale a lot without redundancy or high availability poses a risk to every connected user if the single server goes down.

After many months of work that risk is now part of the history. Openfire Enterprise 3.4.0 provides support for clustering. Clustering will let you run Openfire on several machines serving the same XMPP domain. Clustering can be enabled with just one click from the admin console. Machines running Openfire Enterprise will automatically meet between them to form a cluster. With clustering you not only get high availability but also improved scalability. In our internal load tests, we got more than half a million concurrent connections sending lots of packets in a cluster of just 2 nodes.

Another nice addition to Openfire Enterprise is SparkWeb. Users can now connect to the server and chat from your website. Read the SparkWeb: Next Generation blog post for more information.

On the open source side we also have excellent news. More than 30 new features and more than 30 bugs were fixed. Personal Eventing via Pubsub was added so you can now publish your geo-location, music you are listening to and let subscribers be alerted. From the admin console you can manage users roster. Moreover, it is now possible to retrieve photos from LDAP and use them as users avatars. The complete set of changes can be found here.

You can download Openfire from here. Openfire Enterprise can be downloaded from here.

Enjoy,

Openfire Team

Openfire 3.4 Clustering Beta

dombiak_gaston — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:31:14 GMT

During the last few years we have been listening to the community and our Openfire Enterprise customers. You all had the same question: "When will Openfire support clustering"?

I'm happy to report that Openfire 3.4.0 Beta now has support for clustering. Clustering will let you run several machines serving the same domain thus allowing you to scale your services and at the same time providing continuous service even if one machine goes down. Today we are officially starting the beta process that will last until October 31st.

Unlike other Ignite beta programs, this beta comes with benefits and important discounts for those of you that help us test the server. We had to rewrite big portions of the server, and we would like to get many people testing the server to ensure a better product. We thought these incentives might help us recruit more beta testers.

You should know that we have initially tested the server internally and even deployed it to our public servers, so this beta may be more stable than some other beta products.

People interested in participating in the beta program can read this welcome document to learn more about the benefits and discounts you can get by participating. You can find all of the information (download links, documentation, instructions, and more) in the new Openfire 3.4.0 Beta space in the Ignite Community.

Ignite Realtime Blog

Openfire Unleashed

Openfire 3.4 Clustering Beta