Is Spark/Openfire Dead?

I’ve seen some posts from last year regarding this, but just wondering if Spark is pretty much a dead end? A while back I read about all the dev effort going into sparkweb, but that looks like it has not been updated in quite a while as its still at version .9. Also, reading that devs work on this stuff on a volunteer bassi only and in this economy, is any jive dev volunteering to do more for less? I see jive’s products but none of them are a replacement for instant messaging, fastpath, etc. so why abandon it? Move it back to a pay-for product and make some progress. I am reluctant to stop using Openfire/Spark in our enviro because it sort of works, but it seems like I check back every few weeks and nothing changed. More and more unanswered questions in the forums, the news section just gets older and older, etc. What’s especially frustrating is that there is no better open source alternative that I can see. Most clients look like something I would have run next to scorched earth on my 286 years ago. Spark actually looks like an enterprise client, openfire has a good interface and is pretty easy to setup and administer. Fastpath is fairly good and sparkweb is a good idea, but IMO poorly designed.

So, basically, is there any forward momentum left? No roadmap I can see provides any updates for Spark, whether in Adobe Air, .net, etc. Has anyone else implemented an alternative to any of the pieces - server, clients, web client, fastpath, etc.?

Hi,

you may want to take a look at the subversion of Spark. There is some movement recently. However, there is no fixed release date for a 2.6.0 beta3.

You are always welcome to contribute to the code.

Walter

I wish I could. Not a programmer at all. I’ll check on the svn…

Hi Jeffrey,

With regards to openfire, yes, but it isn’t a huge deal as the code continues to work nicely. The only major issues happen when you wander off into the world of LDAP and PEP/PubSub. If you are looking for an actively developed java solution, check out http://www.tigase.org/ (Tigase).

daryl

Hi Daryl,

How far off would you say Tigase is to providing OPF level functionalities?

Thanks

Hi slicer321,

I can’t accurately say. I’m still a happy openfire user

daryl