As it turns out, not long after hitting the 1,000,000 download mark on Openfire, we hit the 3,000,000 mark on the sum total of the Ignite Realtime products!
Many thanks to the community for your interest, involvement, and support! Matt says it best in his post on Jive Talks, so I shall leave it at that. =) Guess it's time for more toasts to the Ignite Realtime community! Thanks everyone!
Ignite Realtime Blog
3 Posts tagged with the ignite_realtime tag
Not just Openfire, all of Ignite Realtime is flying off the virtual shelves!
Posted by jadestorm Mar 20, 2008
One of the things you may have noticed that appeared in the 3.4.3 release of Openfire is a couple of new installers, and some improvements to existing installers. Oddly enough, building installers can be one of the more difficult tasks a developer has. Simply putting out a tarball or zip file is easy, but it's not exactly the most pleasant thing to deal with from an administrator perspective. In the process of creating installers, you often find yourself fighting with differing standards between OS distributions, or different architectures altogether. That said, typically once you have created the installer, there's not much to do with it after, so it's generally a one time cost, so to speak, and the benefits far outweigh the time spent!
In an effort to make Openfire as easy to install as possible, we added official Debian and Solaris packages. Yes, I am aware the Solaris package is listed under Linux right now, but please ignore that for now. 
Are we stopping there? Not really. I'm not yet sure what other OS's we might be providing packages for at this point. FreeBSD is about the only other one I've seen a request for and there's a well maintained port (net-im/openfire) of Openfire already.
What we are investigating now is providing hosted repositories for the packages. Specifically, I'm looking at a Yum and APT repository at the moment. This would allow system administrators to point their repository configs at our repositories and be able to easily keep up to date. We are still working out the logistics of this, so stay tuned!
We're also investigating getting Openfire into more distributions. In other words, instead of having to come to our site to get Openfire, perhaps you could install it from a central Debian repository, or an extras cd, or something of that nature. There are a couple of possibilities in the works on that front, and a couple more I'd like to pursue.
So hopefully in the near future, it will be as easy as ever to get rolling with Openfire!
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?
Ignite Realtime Blog
Ignite Realtime Blog- Contributors:
-
srt
-
svoisen
-
ryang
-
barata7
-
jadestorm
-
dele
-
AWenckus
-
DavidSmith
-
flashgrand
-
greg
-
dombiak_gaston
-
ddman
-
dawn
-
matt
-
admin