Federating Spark clients with BlackBerry Messenger

Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to use my Spark desktop client to connect and communicate with the contacts I’ve got on my BlackBerry. I’d prefer to connect them that way (Spark-to-BlackBerry), although the only documentation I’ve seemed to find says I’ve got to purchase one of several third-party XMPP apps and install it on my smartphone, and then federate with other networks. I was surprised to learn there wasn’t a plugin for Openfire already to do this.

I’ve written about this, and even offered a couple of suggestions as to why this isn’t immediately possible, but I’d like some other opinions. Thanks for your help!

I am confused about your use of tech verbage. I was always under the impression that when you talked about tech stuff being federated, it generally meant clustered, like 3 servers are federated with 1 being the parent or main. Also, you are wanting spark to communicate with your bb, it doesn’t really work that way. to connect to any IM network (jabber, irc, yahoo) you need a client. spark is a client and openfire provides the jabber network.

So that being said, you need a client on your bb, not spark talking to your bb and then to openfire. you need a client on your bb to talk to the openfire server. it has been said in this forum spark will never be developed for the bb, so thats out. so you need another client.

there are a good number of multi protocol clients that work on the bb and can talk to a jabber server, most however require your jabber server to be exposed to the internet. the paid for clients you mentioned in your article work with a BES and so can communicate inside your network already.

I believe the problem is either 1) the use of jabber/xmpp on the bb isn’t important enough and widespread enough for there to be a ton of developers, or 2) the RIM SDK is expensive and difficult to use (I can’t comment on either) making it difficult to even develop apps on the bb.

we have about 130 bb’s at my work and I have checked on this and checked on this, and we can’t just fork out $30 per phone for folks to use this. so our stance is to wait until someone develops it or develop it ourselves, which isn’t going to happen.

Thanks for the heads-up Jason. My understading of “federated” is working with multiple, often disparate platforms at the same time. So to federate in this context is to manage communications between two networks that don’t normally talk.

That’s a relief that you’ve mentioned that Spark won’t support BBs, but a downer, too. Its got great integration with all the other major platforms, I just wondered why RIM was left out of the picture.

Now that I think about it, maybe it’s because XMPP isn’t meant to handle large rosters of contacts at this point. I’ve heard that a test of 2,100 users in a roster is the stress test, and the nationwide BB network’s certainly got a lot more than that.

I’ve got less than 40 BBs at my company, but I wouldn’t mind building a transport to handle Spark-to-BlackBerry initiated conversations (not BlackBerry-to-Spark) if I could be guided and find out why no one’s done it yet.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

“it has been said in this forum spark will never be developed for the bb”

Since I’m new to this forum and haven’t been around for these previous discussions, can you elaborate this? Do you mean there’s no interest in allowing Spark as a desktop I’m client to integrate with the BB (which is what I’m after) or did you mean Spark won’t ever be developed as a BB app? Again, I’d like to keeps things the way they are, but just be able to connect to RIM’s network with Spark on my desktop.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

I got resolution on the problem from Vayusphere, which makes an XMPP client for the BB:

The native Blackberry Messenger does not use a standard IM protocol and does not offer interoperability, so your search may not lead you far.
At least now I can stop searching for the answer.