Ignite Realtime Blog

Jivin' Gateways and More!

jadestorm — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:25:04 GMT

You may or may not already be aware that I have been a full time member of the Jive family for a couple of weeks now! It's been quite interesting to see how different it is from my previous job in a university setting. It's been a lot of fun already and it's really exciting to have turned my favorite hobby into a career. =) My coworkers are great and I almost find myself wondering why I didn't do this earlier.

So what am I going to be doing? Well, the development of the IM Gateway plugin is part of my job now. We'll be setting solid goals and release dates instead of it being dependent entirely on my free time. That and Openfire are my main focuses. I'm really excited about playing a more direct role in Openfire development! One of my first tasks will be to improve the unix installers for Openfire. They have been lacking love for a while now and I have a strong unix background to bring to the table. In one of the next releases of Openfire we'll have improved packages, unix scripts, and better support for more operating system distributions. Overall, good things to come! =)

You may have heard that I have taken over as lead developer of Spark. It's been a long time since I have been involved in client development and I actually miss it. My very first XMPP related project was a client. Now, as you've heard from the Ignite Realtime post preceding this one, Spark is a low priority. My focus with it in terms of work with Jive is bug fixes, maintenance, and paying customer requirements. Beyond that, I'll likely be working on it on my own time when I need a change of pace. I am a Mac user primarily, so you may see more Mac focused fixes at first. If nothing else I'm going to make sure Spark is something I enjoy using, which coincides to a lot of things that the community has reported/requested anyway. I highly encourage folk who are interested to submit patches! The only caveat is that for patches of any size, I'll need you to sign contributor agreements, if you haven't already.

Now, since I'm involved in more than just the IM Gateway plugin now, I can't keep up with the forums as much as I did before. I try to spend some time each day looking over the forums, but with more than just the single forum, it's too much to keep up with entirely. Dawn is working hard on coming up with good ways to involve the community more and try to make sure things don't get missed! She has been speaking on this in the Jive Lounge, so please visit the lounge and contribute if you have some thoughts!

Anyway, I wanted to make sure folk understood that my role has changed and wave hi from within Jive! =) Any questions?

New Community Plugin Space on Ignite

dawn — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:27:43 GMT

There are a bunch of great community developed plugins for Openfire and Spark floating around the net, and we thought it would be a good idea to create a space where people can upload their plugins and share them with the rest of the community.

So far, we have a Packet Filter plugin, a registration form plugin, and more. If you are interested in contributing your plugin or just want to see what others have contributed, head over to the Community Plugins space on Ignite Realtime.

Right now, these are unofficial plugins. Be sure to rate the plugins (rating located at the bottom of each document), since we will use this as a testing ground to find new plugins. We hope that some of these community plugins will eventually become official Ignite Realtime plugins.

Releases: Second Wave

matt — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:27:37 GMT

Just one week later, I'm pleased to announce the second wave of releases:

Wildfire 3.2.0

The production release of Wildfire 3.2 is now available, including updated versions of the Enterprise plugin and the connection manager module. The 3.2 release is a major milestone for the project. We've massively increased scalability and started branching out beyond instant messaging by diving into VoIP support. View the changelog for details.

Spark 2.5.0 Beta 2

We've incorporated a number of bug fixes and minor improvements since the first beta. Grab the download from the new beta area of the site.

Smack 3.0.0 Beta 1

After a long wait, Smack 3.0.0 is now in beta. See the blog entry for full details.

Gateway Plugin 1.0.0 Beta 7

The gateway plugin, which provides connectivity to AOL, ICQ, Yahoo and MSN, gets a step closer to the final 1.0 release with the beta 7 version. View the changelog, or visit the download page. Also check out Daniel's post for details on the release.

SparkWeb 1.0.0 Beta 1

The first downloadable release of SparkWeb is now ready. Over the last week, we fixed support for Safari, did many UI tweaks and added minor new features like emoticon support.

Release News: the Beta Wave

matt — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 23:51:52 GMT

We've been heads-down for the past couple of months, hard at work on major new functionality for Wildfire and Spark. I'm happy to announce the first major wave of releases (in early access form):

Wildfire 3.2.0 Release Candidate 2

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

Massive scalability enhancements. We've tested 30,000 concurrent connections on a single Wildfire box.
HTTP-Bind support.
All-new security certificate management.
Improved Mac OS X installer and management tools.
Numerous bug fixes.

Enterprise Plug-in 3.2.0 Release Candidate 2

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

VoIP SIP client in Spark, with server-side client registration and management, including call reporting.
SparkWeb (see below).
Many Fastpath improvements.

VoIP support marks a major evolution in functionality as we move from instant messaging to real-time collaboration. SIP support is a commercial feature for integration with existing PBX systems, and in the near future we'll be ready to announce Jingle support as Open Source.

Announcing SparkWeb

!http://www.igniterealtime.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/sparkweb_mini.png! The power and elegance of Spark, delivered through pure HTML and Ajax. SparkWeb is a Wildfire Enterprise (commercial) feature and today we're announcing the first public preview. Testing has primarily been done with Firefox up to this point, so support for IE, Opera and Safari is experimental.

In the near future, the Javascript library that SparkWeb is based on will be released as Open Source. The HTTP Bind implementation that powers the back-end is a standard component of Wildfire 3.2. You can view a live demo of SparkWeb on igniterealtime.org (you'll need to register an account on ignite with a different account to get in). In the near future, we'll have a plugin download available for testing on your own server.

Spark 2.5.0 Beta 1

Highlights (or see full changelog and download):

Enhanced look and feel.
Adium emoticon pack support
Improved notifications - know who's coming and going.
Improved Memory handling and speed.
Drag and drop of transferred files.
Buzz feature.

*Message Styles Specification

For the past several months, Adium engineer David Smith has been working as an intern here at Jive Software. He's helped make all our software more Mac friendly -- new builds for Wildfire and Spark so far, with many more Spark improvements coming soon. He's also been working on an open specification for message styles, a very cool feature that will be coming to Spark soon. The first version of the specification was published today.

Adium message styles allow the look of the message window to be totally customized, a feature that users love. By defining an open specification, multiple IM clients will be able to share message style implementations -- so, the same theme that works in Adium will also work in Spark and possibly other clients. All the Mac users here at Jive are big fans of Adium (especially given its support for XMPP), so we're excited about this project as a way for the two products to work together. In related news, Adium 1.0 is about to be released, so check it out if you're a Mac user.

More Soon...

We're just getting warmed up with these beta releases, so look for more announcements soon!

So, you want to write a plugin...

ryang — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:04:17 GMT

One of the great things about using open source software is that if you want to alter the way an application works or add a feature you can jump right into the code and make all the changes you want. A down side to all this freedom is that if you make a change to the source and then awhile later a new version of the software comes out, you have to merge your changes in with the new version. Depending on the sort of changes you've made, this can be a real nightmare. One increasingly popular way to avoid this sort of hassle is by using plugins. What is a plugin? Wikipedia provides a pretty good description: "A plugin (or plug-in) is a computer program that interacts with a main (or host) application to provide a certain, usually very specific, function on-demand." Some programs that you might have heard of or be familiar with that use plugins are Elipse, Firefox and of course Wildfire and Spark.

This is the first in a series of articles that will explore what can be accomplished with the use of plugins for both Wildfire and Spark. Initially, I'll focus on Wildfire plugins, beginning with a couple of pointers to get the plugin development environment setup. Then over the course of the following articles, I'll discuss some of the more commonly used API's, develop a plugin or two and maybe even get a Spark plugin to talk to a Wildfire plugin.

Now, let's get started!

Download the Wildfire source

This one may seem like a no-brainer to some, but it's not entirely obvious that you need the Wildfire source in order to develop plugins. As an added bonus, included along with the Wildfire source is the source to all the existing open source plugins. I don't know about you, but when starting in an unfamiliar development I really appreciate having access to sample code that I can reference.

Kick the tires

Now that you have the source, work your way down to the src/plugins directory and look at how some of the plugins are put together in terms of both their structure and the code itself. Even though the plugins all share the same basic structure, they vary greatly in complexity and the API's that they use. The registration plugin is probably the most basic, while the gateway plugin is by far the most complex.

Check out the documentation

As you may have noticed, the Wildfire source also contains a great deal of documentation. One of things I like to do is to bookmark the index.html page (located in documentation/docs directory) so that I can quick access the Plugin Developer Guide and Wildfire JavaDocs. And if you haven't already, I strongly recommend you read over the "Plugin Developer Guide" and "Building the Source" how-to's. There are two additional items not mentioned in either of these guides that will help speed up your plugin development. One, instead of executing the 'ant plugins' command which builds and deploys all the plugins use the 'ant -Dplugin=your_plugin plugin' command instead (replacing 'your_plugin' with the one plugin you want to build) which will only build and deploy the plugin you specified. And two, during the plugin development configure and use the wildfire-dev startup script (located in the target/wildfire/bin directory) to startup Wildfire. By using the script instead of the 'ant run' command you can edit your plugin source files and see the changes without having to redeploy your plugin. A potential gotcha to using this script when editing .jsp files is that you need to have a empty WEB-INF directory in the your_plugin/src/web directory. If the WEB-INF directory is not present your plugin will still load and you'll be able to view its .jsp pages but any changes you make to the source will not be re-compiled and you'll fill up your error log with JasperExceptions.

All right, so now that we have some of basics out of the way, next time we'll be able to jump right in to some code. My hope is that this series of articles will be as beneficial and interactive as possible. If there are any additional topics you'd like me to cover or if you have further questions regarding something I've written or indicated, please leave a comment or send me an email.

See you on the forums,

Ryan, aka ryang

Spark, Wildfire, and the MacOS

DavidSmith — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:25:18 GMT

With all the Apple news recently, as well as several new employees using Macs (including myself), I thought I'd write up a little update on what Jive is doing to improve how our products run on the Mac. There are a couple of areas where we're making big strides forward:

Installation Experience

Most Mac applications are distributed in disk image (.dmg) files, and some are installed from the .dmg via an installer package (.pkg) file. Disk images alone are used for standalone apps that can be installed by dropping them where you want them, while installer packages are used for more complex apps that install lots of support files.

The Spark dmg file now includes some spiffy background art based on the Spark logo, as well as a symlink to the applications folder so installing really is just drag -> drop; no need to dig around in the filesystem finding the applications folder first.

Wildfire is a bit more complex. The new Wildfire.pkg file creates an unprivileged user called Wildfire, so that the application can run in a "sandbox" much as apache and other system services do. It also installs the next two improvements on the list...

Launchd and Wildfire

Launchd is Apple's new replacement for init, rc, inetd, xinetd, atd, crond, watchdogd, and SystemStarter. As of Mac OS X 10.4 it's the recommended way for services like Wildfire to run, so I have created a launch daemon file for Wildfire. This allows for all sorts of customization for the savvy system administrator, including easily imposing resource limits, automating startup and shutdown, and other handy things previously spread across the system in various configuration files. For people who don't want to spend their time tweaking XML files, there's a new feature of Wildfire that makes controlling this even easier...

Wildfire System Preference Pane

The Wildfire prefpane provides a simple interface for starting and stopping Wildfire, configuring whether Wildfire will start when the system starts up, and accessing the administration page.

Spark Fixes

Tuesday morning we had a meeting where we brainstormed a whole bunch of fixes and improvements to Spark, ranging from renaming preferences in the Mac version (Toast? We use Growl in these parts!), to fixing keyboard shortcuts (command-w is on the list), to making sure that windows gain focus correctly when new messages are added. This sort of polishing should make Spark much nicer to use, even without some of the larger things that we're looking at, such as Address Book integration.