Ignite Realtime Blog

GSoC 2008 Report: Openfire and SparkWeb

huni — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:44:31 GMT

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.

Webchat client of Fastpath is now available

dombiak_gaston — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:32:51 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 23:52:15 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

Turning Openfire Enterprise into an open source product

dombiak_gaston — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:25:50 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.