First Release Candidate of Smack 4.2 has been released

The Ignite Realtime community is proud to announce that nearly 2 years after the release of Smack 4.1, the first Release Candidate (RC) of Smack 4.2 has been uploaded to Maven Central. Smack 4.2 marks another milestone in the development of Smack. With the availability of the first RC, the API of Smack 4.2 was sealed. This means that now is the ideal time for Smack users to adopt their codebase to the new Smack 4.2 API, and eventually start using Smack 4.2 in the experimental/development branch of their codebase. Please consult the Smack 4.2 Readme and Upgrade Guide for more information.

I’d like to use this post also to draw your attention at a very important topic. The codebase of smack-core and -tcp has grown historically over the past 15 years. This is not an issue per se. Smack was well designed from the beginning, is now modular and not affected by bit rot. But especially on important class, namely XMPPTCPConnection, has come to age. It is based on threads, when it should use NIO. It uses triggers for state changes, when it should be designed as finite state machine. And some more. I know that a lot of people are affected by Smack creating at least 2 threads per connection (instead of using NIO). This all also contributed at some amount to the latest security vulnerability found in Smack (SMACK-739 / CVE 2016-10027).

The only solution to tackle this would be to re-implement the affected code from scratch. But needles to say that this also would require funding, as it is not a simple one weekend task. I hope to have the resource to do this at some point in the future. If you think you can help, or know someone who possibly would be interested support the funding, then please contact me.

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Thanks for this RC, is there an ETA for Final Release version of Smack 4.2?

See Smack Release Life Cycle · igniterealtime/Smack Wiki · GitHub