Ignite Realtime Blog

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.

Flash-based Audio and Video in Spark, SparkWeb and Openfire

dele — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 06:08:54 GMT

When SparkWeb became open-source, I took a look at the source code and found it had more features than the Flex-based XMPP client I was co-developing for the Red5 Plugin. It therefore made sense to migrate the Flash audio and video features we had developed for our client to SparkWeb and make it compatible with the Spark and Openfire Red5 Plugins and package it as part of the Red5 plugin. The downside to this that the modifications to the Red5 version of SparkWeb makes it out of sync with the official SVN and it could possibly become a fork requiring a name change later on.

So what does the Red5 SparkWeb offer?

A plugin container for SparkWeb. I noticed that quite a number of users are asking for a plugin to deploy SparkWeb. My advice would be to try the Red5 Plugin.

Configure Index.html and point your users at

http://your_server:nnnn/red5_webapp_name/sparkweb

Where nnnn is your HTTP-BIND port number (default 7070) and red5_webapp_name is your default red5 web application name (default red5)
Enables use of the Red5 plugin audio and video features with both Spark and SparkWeb. You can't do video messaging and the video roster is replaced with visual presence (see below). You can make audio/video calls and share your desktop with your contacts. Each call record is logged in openfire and can be queried by the administrator with the Openfire SIP plugin.
Makes SIP phone calls between Spark and SparkWeb users. All SparkWeb SIP calls are logged with the Openfire SIP plugin as well.
Provides webcam support. If you have a webcam installed on your PC, it will be automatically detected and will be used instead of your vcard photo. You can disable this in index.html. You can add or replace your vcard photo with a snapshot of your webcam when you edit your profile. You can also publish snapshots from your webcam as visual presence to all your contacts. What this means is that all your contacts will have a snapshot of your webcam in their rosters. The interval between snapshots is 60 secs by default and can be modified in index.html. See a draft copy of my proposal to extend XMPP with visual presence. Please feel free to post comments at the bottom of the document.

I also made a few cosmetic changes to my taste and added sound effects for incoming calls and instant messaging. I added some code to improve the loss of focus detection by tracking Flash application activation/deactivation messages and mouse movement. If you use Internet explorer and enable pop-ups, you will get a pop-up in the bottom right corner of the screen with a photo, name and first line of the incoming messaging if you are outside of SparkWeb when a new message arrives.

I am hoping to add fastpath support and a calendar to SparkWeb next.

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.

Whack and SparkWeb have graduated. Help me congratulate them!

dombiak_gaston — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:10:46 GMT

Whack 1.0 has been released. Whack is our Open Source XMPP (Jabber) component library for XMPP components. External components are processes that run outside of the Openfire's process but can connect to the server to register new XMPP service. Whack is an implementation of XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol.

Unlike the other igniterealtime products, Whack followed a different evolution path. We started coding Whack around November 2004 and after a few months it was operational. Openfire and Whack share the same component's API so around 2005 we were able to run Fastpath as an internal component (i.e. running in the Openfire's process) or just move it as an external component using Whack. It was impressive seeing the same code running as internal and external. Since then Whack continued to evolve but always at a very slow pace. Whack was always stable in each step but it was just not ready for prime time. We wanted to keep adding more things to it to reach a 1.0 release. Since our collaboration software Clearspace uses Whack to integrate with Openfire we needed to push the boundaries of Whack once again and I'm happy to say that we now reached the 1.0 release. And that is why we decided to make a public release in 2008 after 4 years of continuous but slow growth.

A few months ago we also released a new product called SparkWeb. SparkWeb is our Open Source web-based IM client. SparkWeb is based on XIFF just like Spark is based on Smack. Today we updated the products page to list SparkWeb as an official product. Welcome SparkWeb! The family has grown a little bit now.

You can get Whack from here. Questions could be posted to the Whack forum.

SparkWeb can be downloaded from here. If you want to build from the source code you can read the Getting and Building SparkWeb document.

SparkWeb Open Source

DavidSmith — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:37:59 GMT

Earlier today I exported our svn repository for SparkWeb and committed the intial import to the new open source repository! Instructions for getting and building the source are available. Getting and Building SparkWeb. A chat room for discussion of SparkWeb development can be found at sparkweb@conference.igniterealtime.org. I'm looking forward to seeing what the community can do!

XIFF 3 Beta

DavidSmith — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:40:58 GMT

I'm happy to announce that we've just released an initial beta of XIFF 3.0, our open source ActionScript library for building XMPP clients. Continuing along the path set by Sean and the previous developers of XIFF, we've moved to embrace ActionScript 3 and Flex, while adding significant functionality improvements at the same time. Highlights include BOSH support, VCard support, and redesigned APIs. Feedback is strongly requested; It has been quite a while since a XIFF release, and a lot of things have changed, so I will be interested to see how the community feels about the direction we've taken things.

Some parts of this new release are still in a transitional stage. For example, SASL support is only available for BOSH connections at the moment. As more code is generalized between the BOSH and Socket connections, this limitation will go away.

Our Client Strategy

matt — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:13:47 GMT

So, what's up with Spark? Many of you have commented on the fact that the pace of development has slowed and that Derek is less present in the community. Now that a major new version of SparkWeb is out, it seems like a good time to provide a more detailed status report on everything happening around client development.

First up, an announcement: Derek has taken a new position (Sales Engineer) inside of Jive. So far he seems to be loving it, but I'll let him comment on this blog post with further details. Unfortunately, that means that Spark has lost its lead developer. For the time being, other team members have stepped in to help out. We're committed to providing bug fixes and minor new fixes to Spark for the foreseeable future. It remains one of the best cross-platform XMPP clients available.

Since Spark development is slowing down, what's next? Most of Jive's XMPP client efforts are now focused on the web via the SparkWeb Flash client. We're using the same technology base to add real-time features to Clearspace. Further, the upcoming Adobe Air technology offers the intriguing possibility of building a new desktop client using Flash. To us, it all seems like the perfect triple play -- a single code base that can be used for Sparkweb, Clearspace features and a new Spark desktop client. Only Sparkweb is ready so far, but you'll see new real-time features in Clearspace soon and we'll keep everyone updated on a desktop client based on Adobe Air.

Change isn't always easy and I'm sure that some of you will be disappointed to hear that our approach to how we build Spark is changing. There may be some rough spots as we move from one technology to another, but we're pretty excited about where things are headed.

SparkWeb: Next Generation

DavidSmith — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:36:26 GMT

One of the new things other than clustering in Openfire Enterprise 3.4 is a new release of SparkWeb. This marks a number of major transitions for it:

Simplified Installation

First, it's now built into Openfire Enterprise. No more downloading a separate plugin, and no configuration required. You'll find it in a new sidebar item in the "enterprise" tab of the admin console.

Moving to Flash

Second is that it's entirely new code. As we worked on the original SparkWeb, we ran into many limitations of the "ajax" (html + CSS + javascript + xmlhttprequest) platform, including browser compatibility issues, difficulty with localization, and the inability to support any sort of richer collaboration experience like voice or video. As a result, Derek DeMoro wrote a prototype of a web based XMPP client in Flash, using XIFF and Adobe's new Flex API. The new SparkWeb is descended from that, rather than from the previous version.

Work In Progress

There's good and (temporary) bad with this transition. The new code supports vcards and avatars, and is significantly smaller, resulting in quicker page loading. There's also a revamped UI, including contact list filtering much like Spark has. On the other hand, group chat support and secure connections are not quite ready in the new code, and are planned for the next minor Openfire Enterprise release.

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to post them in the Openfire Enterprise Support forum