The Ignite Realtime Community is thrilled to announce the availability of a beta quality release of Openfire 4.2.0. Downloads of release artifacts can be found on our beta release website and a changelog denoting 60 some Jira issues resolved is available as well.
So what has changed with Openfire 4.2? A lot! Some highlights:
- XEP-0237 Roster Versioning
- Server to Server (s2s) is more robust
- The websocket functionality, previously in a plugin, was merged into core
- The Admin Console now has a Pub-Sub administration interface
- You can now manually test a Server to Server connection on the Admin Console
- XEP-0198 Client Resumption is now available
- A lot of polish and new handy functionality was added to the Admin Console
- Openfire plugin loading is much more robust
Here is a listing of sha1sum values for the release binaries
f6b69035c848c7555d2710b26efbb6a927e86175 openfire-4.2.0-0.2.beta.i686.rpm 4142b5baf024b603949b64f3896964ed4dcab196 openfire-4.2.0-0.2.beta.noarch.rpm eb6e993e2ea185da235a9039b227a676d96210a0 openfire-4.2.0-0.2.beta.x86_64.rpm ffcf842fd9a64741140bfdde560c952a34db08a9 openfire_4.2.0.beta_all.deb 5077b1283d91e23880148fc9891a18af02fb5c68 openfire_4_2_0_beta_bundledJRE.exe c6108509b29fb8339f444e0b766d212818560465 openfire_4_2_0_beta_bundledJRE_x64.exe 8c68a07c1933754af2042bc5cd76e2545a2bcdd6 openfire_4_2_0_beta.dmg 551015e80cf4a001a6f97deda869cbdde8f7151f openfire_4_2_0_beta.exe aff23069cac31aad0ee902077fd8cd4f85ea3c1f openfire_4_2_0_beta.tar.gz b8255d7d7cd06a35f3bf12cc38d3473aa34669a5 openfire_4_2_0_beta_x64.exe ed53cb92966f8e21e373afcca491dd3e1b70bb7e openfire_4_2_0_beta.zip b380d386c2f3b4007dc9755648c579b984b52389 openfire_src_4_2_0_beta.tar.gz f814b17f00084ef904959b3241044cf63981ece4 openfire_src_4_2_0_beta.zip
Our current intention is for a quick turnaround of this beta into a full release, so please do test it and let us know of troubles you find by either visiting our webchat or creating posts in our Discourse Openfire Dev Forum.
A big thanks goes out to our current developers for doing a lot of work to make this beta release happen. These include @dwd, @guus, @gdt, and others now submitting pull requests to our Github Repository. A special thanks goes to folks at Surevine who have been actively supporting Openfire development.
For those interested in development, here are some current talking points of where development stands.
- A large whitespace pull request was made against the master-branch, which is now the 4.2.0 beta. The intention of this was to not frustrate all of you that maintain forks of Openfire :), but to make future Openfire contributions easier. The code base should now follow the Editor Config guidelines and so your IDE should be able to focus better on actual code changes and not fixing whitespace issues.
- At this point, there is not much appetite for an additional 4.1 branch release, but that could of course change. We’d like to get 4.2.0 out the door, then branch master into a 4.2 branch and then focus on moving forward with 4.3 development and stabilizing 4.2 branch with a 4.2.1 release.
- master branch continues to support building with ant and maven, with Install4j artifacts built from the ant side. We like to consolidate on maven, but work needs to be done in this area. Please consider contributing if you have maven/install4j expertise!
And in closing, please consider helping out with development. The needs are many, but some particular areas of interest are:
- improving Openfire’s LDAP implementation
- Bringing core functionality like Multi User Chat (MUC) up to current specifications
- Vastly improving Openfire’s automated testing
We are an easy going bunch and I personally love chipping in to help out. We all hang out within the groupchat each day, so stop by! If your organization relies on Openfire, please consider helping out!
Hopefully everybody enjoys the beta release and we can turn around a full release shortly, thanks for reading and your support of Ignite Realtime!
