As of December 2007, we have jumped onto the release train process and have been releasing a new version of Openfire every 3 weeks. Many important features have been added and several issues were fixed. Here are some relevant new features that were added:

• Certificates created and signed by CA can be imported from the admin console

• Added support for XEP-0115: Entity Capabilities

• Avatars may now be updated when using LDAP

• Improved connection pool recovery logic by switching to proxool

• Created Email Listener plugin

For the first and second quarters of 2008 we decided to focus on features that are going to be useful for enterprises, but not restricted to the enterprise product.  Example of these features are:

Use TLS and SASL when connecting external components

A new extension named XEP-0225: Component Connections was created for this feature that we think it's going to be useful for companies with very strong security requirements. This feature will not only require some changes to Openfire but also to our Whack library. Whack is our external components open source library that we never pushed publicly in the community but we do support and use internally.

Let external components connect to the same Openfire instance and register for the same domain

In order to provide redundancy in external components we should let them connect to the same Openfire instance. Openfire will then use round robin to distribute the requests to the connected external components. Therefore, only external components that are stateless can use this feature unless they are stateful and communicate amongst themselves, perhaps in a cluster environment. Similar to the previous feature this feature will imply a change on Openfire and also to the Whack library.

Add auditing support to the admin console

Many people have requested this feature and it was decided to implement it for Openfire 3.5.0. When running standalone the auditing information will be stored in the database of Openfire but when running integrated with Clearspace then the auditing information will be stored in Clearspace which acts as the main repository.

Database optimizations

In the past we focused on optimizing the Java code when under heavy load and now it's time to focus on the database specially when dealing with large sets of data. This work should help users log in faster, retrieve their rosters and perform any frequent operation quicker. Overall we know that Openfire has great performance but doing an in-depth review is never a bad idea. 

Release a new version of XIFF

While working on SparkWeb, our web version of the popular Spark client, we ended up doing lots of nice improvements to the XIFF library. Having tested those changes for a while we now feel confident to push out there a new release of XIFF. Meanwhile, every week we have been updating our SparkWeb instance that is publicly available. Feel free to use it and give us your feedback.

Other things that have been brewing in our heads but are still not planned for the immediate future are:

• Multi domain support

• File sharing in rooms based on XEP-0214: File Repository and Sharing

• Framework for chat transcript management

• XEP-0195: User Browsing to know what other people are browsing on the web

• XEP-0194: User Chatting to know the group chat rooms where people joined

If you are interested in seeing some other feature that has not been planned please speak up and leave us a comment. We will create a Jira issue, if one does not exist, so people can vote. Highly voted issues are taken in consideration when building the roadmap of the products. The current roadmap can be found here.

Enjoy,

  -- Gato