Smack and the Jive Messenger are critical services in my Rich Servent Application. As you can imagine, the infrastructure is based on scores of open source offerings provided by organizations as large as Eclipse and as small as a lone developer in Spain providing some other piece of the puzzle. Out of all those projects and organizations with which I work, all those projects and organizations that I invest time and energy to examine only to find that they simply do not stand up to production-worthy standards of software engineering and/or support, your projects and you support stands out.
I just remembered to come back to check on something after being off working on other, usually broken, pieces of the puzzle, and found upgrades to both key projects. Sure, I waited until a weekend to install the upgrades, just in case, but I needn’'t have worried. Each upgrade installed simply and without even raising a fuss, Jive Messenger informed me that it found my former database and simply upgraded the schema as necessary – no back-up/restore, no loss of information with time-consuming reconstruction.
Thank you for the excellent work.
Now for the request. It is precisely because of the quality of your work that I really, really want a solution to my need for nice file sharing to come from you instead of my hacking around with figuring out how to allow ftp from client to central site, and ftp from client to client, just using the central site for distributed searches of what the client members are interested in sharing.
I have looked at what seems to be a part of what is available in the Jabber framework, and what appears to be possible. Can I have an update on whether or not you plan to add some implementation of some form of Jabber-based file sharing within the next 6 months, next 12 months, or probably not in my lifetime. Of course, I’'d love to just get a plugin solution on the Messenger, but if you guys will provide the correct design and library support in Smack, that will be, in my estimation, a better basis for a robust solution than anything that I might cobble from the various other pieces of infrastructure.
Thank you.