Openfire 3.7.1
Openfire is a real time collaboration (RTC) server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.
I have a just added WebRTC audio/video support to OfChat to confirm that the proposed WebRTC transport for Jingle actually works.
OfChat is a web client for Openfire implemented as a Chrome extension. I am not releasing the WebRTC code until the the next release of Chrome which will use JSEP instead of ROAP.
UPDATE
I have attached the latest OfChat Chrome extension (ver 0.0.8) with support for WebRTC using the Jingle WebRTC Transport proposal. Sadly, the proposal is to be withdrawn, so this might be incompatible with anything else in a few months time. See posting below for requirements. It is all in HTML and JavaScript, so finds where Chrome installs it to see source code.
For those who are following, WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs and is now available for Chrome.
A while ago, I implemented a Websocket plugin for Openfire that uses Jetty 7.5. Work is already under way by community member Pat Santora to make it a core plugin for Openfire.
WebRTC with WebSockets when fully functional, will enable audio and video conferencing from a web browser without the need for a browser plugin like Flash and even a media server like Red5. The media connection will be peer to peer directly between browsers and the signaling can be SIP, Jingle or whatever over a WebSocket connection or HTTPRequest.
To see how WebRTC compares to Flash Player with RTMFP, I created a simple web page demo using the WebSockets plugin for Openfire and JavaScript and tested with the latest Chrome Canary 19.0.1041.
Performance is good, but it is still early days as the WebRTC specification is still evolving. There are active debates on signaling, device capability discovery and where to hide the the complex code; JavaScript libraries or the Browser. For those who want to see what's under the hood, I have attached the single web page. Run two instances from two different PCs. Change the JavaScript to suit your own Openfire server.
I think I have enough to get started on adding two-way Jingle Audio/Video to the OfChat web client using a WebRTC compatible transport.
Dear Community!
Another year has passed for this open source project and various developers have contributed significantly to nearly all of our projects. We were able to finally release Openfire 3.7 and Spark 2.6.3 under Apache 2.0 license. The most important Smack library has also seen several releases and last but not least the good old instant messaging gateway Kraken returned to us. Some great innovations were presented like SparkWeb/Redfire, Websocks and Candy. I really would like to thank all developers involved by contributing code and all users and system admins that went through this year. A very special thank you goes to Daryl Herzmann who keeps the servers healthy and Wroot for outstanding work in the forum. I would also like to single out Guus der Kinderen for his insights in Openfire architecture and the release of Openfire 3.7.
Merry Christmas to all of you and a happy, healthy and sucessful 2012
The Ignite Realtime community is happy to announce the release of version 3.7.1 of Openfire! Downloads for various platforms are available here.
Openfire is a real time collaboration (RTC) server licensed under the Open Source Apache license. It uses the only widely adopted open protocol for instant messaging, XMPP (also called Jabber). Openfire is incredibly easy to setup and administer, but offers rock-solid security and performance.
The 3.7.1 release is primarily a bugfix release. Amongst others, these issues have been addressed:
- A number of enhancements were made to the server-to-server connectivity. Server-to-Server connectivity was enhanced and a bug preventing a successful dialback was fixed.
- Various improvements have been made to platform specific installers and scripts.
- The Multi-User Chat implementation has received various tweaks and updates.
The full changelog is available on the Openfire project page.
We welcome your feedback, suggestions, tips, hints, questions and other contributions in the Ignite Realtime Community pages.
This is an implementation of WebSockets for the Openfire XMPP server. It consists a plugin for Openfire and a low-level JavaScript library suitable to be used with jQuery.
Why?
Recently, I have been involved in shaping an XMPP protocol extension (XEP) for simple application remote control of telephony devices for financial trading systems. This XEP is called Openlink and is still evolving.
I use XMPP Bosh to provide an Openlink Javascript library for web based applications and I am seeking to improve performance and scalability beyond the limitations of long-polling BOSH connections, so I decided to investigate replacing BOSH with Websockets in my Openlink Javascript library.
What did you do?
The Websocket protocol is close to finalising and Jetty (the embedded web server for Openfire) has been supporting WebSocket since Nov 2009 in version 7.0.1 which is the Jetty version in current Openfire 3.7.0. My first attempt of using the Jetty WebSocketServelet? class from Openfire 3.7.0 with Google Chrome web browser failed and I am not sure why. The WebSockets specification has changed a lot over the last two years and both Chrome and Jetty have kept up with it, so I was not surprised.
I therefore decided to recompile Openfire from SVN (version 3.7.1 Alpha) with latest Jetty 7.5.1 and finally got it working.
I then implemented a very thin XMPP stanza based Javascript class called openfire-websockets which exposes a minimium "Stophe" like connection object which I tested with the XMPP console application in chapter 4 of the book "Professional XMPP Programming with JavaScript and jQuery" by Jack Moffitt.
How?
You can use this plugin from Openfire 3.7.0. Just replace openfire.jar and slf4j-log4j12.jar in OPENFIRE_HOME\lib.
Should I?
If you do most of your application development with XMPP like I do, using Openfire and need fast and simple access to the low level XMPP messages as DOM elements in Javascript from JQuery right now, then take a look at openfire-websockets.js
Where?
 |
Guus Won't tell us where he's from, but says he's from the 'Nether Lands' ... wait that's a real country? |