We are pleased to announce the release of Openfire 3.5.1, now with even more openness! This release represents the first stage of the Enterprise plugin split into open source plugins. We’re very excited to be able to provide these to everyone for free, and seeing what the community does with them, both in terms of contributed code and use case scenarios. So lets talk about some specifics.
New Plugins!
Monitoring: Adds support for server statistics and chat archiving and reports.
Fastpath: Support for managed queued chat requests, such as a support team might use.
These are the first two pieces of the open sourced Enterprise plugin. Client management is coming very soon, as is clustering. SparkWeb will also be released tomorrow as a separate product. So you might be wondering, hey, why is there an Openfire Enterprise 3.5.1? Well, due to the lack of all of the plugins being available right now, we’ve provide 3.5.1 for existing enterprise customers to make use of. It includes some important clustering fixes though! (as will the clustering plugin when it is release)
Important, Seriously, Pay Attention, Read This
If you install the Monitoring and/or Fastpath plugin, make absolute sure that you read the readme first! There are included instructions for how to migrate your database from the Enterprise plugin to the new plugin database tables. If you have ever run the Enterprise plugin or the old Fastpath plugin before it was integrated with Enterprise, make sure you don’t forget this or you will be unhappy!
Big Connection Manager Improvements
The connection managers have been updated to bring HTTP binding up to date and a couple of library upgrades that include a number of improvements. It is important to note though that the conf/manager.xml file has been updated and you will need to update yours as well. The new http binding section that you will need to add is described here.
Ok Fine, Where Do I Get It?
You can download Openfire 3.5.1 here.
You can see the entire changelog here.
You can view the documentation for 3.5.1 here.
Plugins can be downloaded from the admin console or here.
Ok. Would there be an option to open up the clustering parts around Coherence that are not subject to the licensing issue?
I had a look at shoal and terracotta and I guess there are generic parts in the clustering plugin that could speed up integration of an alternative replication solution.
That’s a good question and I don’t have the answer to it. I’ll ask around. I suspect it’s one of those annoying licenses where you can’t share anything where you even used it. =/
So, Fastpath for clients is only available via webchat (sparkweb)? Is there a possibility this oculd be done via Spark, like with agents? Could be like a contact in roster - “SOS” So you open a chat with it and ask, and fastpath will start its queue…
The webclient.war (web application not sparkweb) is what users use to make requests. The web application provides a nice http/html UI that implements the XEP-0142: Workgroup Queues. Since we are following a XEP it is possible to build other clients that follow the same spec.
Having said that, Fastpath also provides a textual interface via a bot. Users from any XMPP client can send a message to the workgroup address (aka JID) and a bot will answer.
Would there be an option to open up the clustering parts around Coherence that are not subject to the licensing issue?
When clustering was implemented we took special care to decouple it entirely from Coherence. The result of that work was that the enterprise plugin was only providing the implementation of some interfaces. Those implementations are the ones that are using the Coherence tool. That means that it should be possible to use other clustering solution and implement some interfaces and make clustering work.
Let me know if you are seeing some parts of the code that we need to review.
To add to David’s comment. Code of webclient.war is going to be moved to the public SVN soon. For now people can download and use it just fine with the open source version of Fastpath.
Gato, thanks for your info. Text is working, but it’s a bit awkward. Clients need to support that XEP better probably? Would be great to have a possibility to add workgroup jid to your roster (or push it via shared groups, or like a bookmark in private storage). So anyone could easily access such support.
As srt (Stefan) said, it is possible to subscribe to the presence of a workgorup by just adding the workgroup JID to your roster. IIRC, it is also possible to put workgroups in shared groups so they are automatically pushed to clients.
So you open a chat with it and ask, and fastpath will start its queue…