I use Openfire and SparkWeb everyday and recently starting evaluating Clearspace to power the community I am building for my wife's education consultancy (www.inspiredfutures.co.uk). As I had limited computing power and memory to work with on my hosted server, it became expedient that I needed to integrate all three products under the same web server and Java JVM.

The first thing I did was to make an openfire plugin out of Clearspace

The next thing I did was to enable SparkWeb display an HTML page from its chat container

The result is what you see above and I am very pleased with it (chuffed as we say in the UK). The benefits of integrating Openfire and Clearspace has already been mentioned here . Adding SparkWeb to that combination in order to have realtime messaging, desktop sharing, Red5 audio/video calling and a SIP phone makes a compelling case for me to use Clearspace

I have reservations about real-time integration with web applications that use the MVC model based on Stuts like Clearspace or even PHP applications like SugarCRM. Even Salesforce.com also falls into the same group because they all build their UI on the server and everytime the user does anything that requires a server fetch, the screen goes all blank while you wait for the whole page to be rebuilt from server-side Java code.

Putting a softphone or an IM client as a widget in these applications requires constant connect/disconnect cycles as the user moves from page to page. It reminds me of my attempt to build a real-time application on an Apple iPhone and a softphone in Salesforce.com. What we need is to be able to keep our widgets UI resident on the client as well as the user session in the plugin on the server. I am curious to see how Jive Software implements the realtime widgets in Clearspace.

In the meantime, I am happy to make SparkWeb my container for real-time web applications as I am getting biased towards Adobe's open-source Flex as my de-facto web client application development platform. I learnt a lot from studying the SparkWeb code and I am planing on developing some Clearspace widgets that use SparkWeb's features through the Javascript External Interface to make the integration complete.

If you want to use SparkWeb as a container for your web applications as I have done, pick up the latest version of the Red5 plugin from here. Copy and edit index.html. Change the httpLabel and httpURL parameters to your preference.

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

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.