The Ignite Realtime community is happy to announce the release of Spark 3.0.0 Beta version.
We decided to increase major version to 3.x to coincide with a complete UI refresh of Spark which was contributed by Amos. We are very much grateful for his incredible work. Along that Pade Meetings plugin was added by Dele. And a few other fixes and improvements by others. We wanted to have a few more items for this major version, like latest Smack library, Carbons support, JCEF, etc. But there are not enough time and contributors to get everything done. Hopefully will be added later.
As this is a major visual change and there are a few other changes under the hood, we decided to first do a Beta release and let it cook for a while. Feel free to test it and report any findings in the forums.
Pade Meetings (formerly SparkMeet) plugin is included in this release. You can find it in a chat window, a button with P letter. This plugin works with Openfire Meetings and enables audio and video chat. It was modified by Dele Olajide to use Electron technology. First time a user logs in using this version Spark will download required libraries into user’s profile (it is around 150 MB on Windows, so can take a minute to download).
Full list of changes can be found in the changelog.
We encourage users and developers to get involved with Spark project by providing feedback in the forums or submitting pull requests on our GitHub page.
You can download Spark Beta from the Downloads page. Below are the sha1 checksums:
Great job on the 3.0.0 milestone and thanks to everyone involved!
I have a suggestion/complaint regarding the inclusion of the Pade Meetings plugin. There needs to be a way to make this optional; the inclusion of this plugin and the required libraries balloons the size of the profile on Windows by hundreds of megabytes. In our environment we use roaming profiles and this creates an unacceptable outcome where we are hauling around hundreds of megabytes across our WAN for a plugin we don’t even use currently.
If you want to include it these things should be placed in C:\Program Files for all users rather than downloading it for each user to AppData\Roaming.
EDIT: it is even worse than I thought; if you delete the plugin, Spark will re-download it all again upon next start up. That behavior has got to go or be configurable at the least. The inclusion of this plugin adds 704MB to the roaming profile size which I would think most any organization would find unacceptable.
Incredibly excited to hear the Carbon Copies are finally on the roadmap for Spark. Any wild estimate about when they might actually be added as a working feature?
On a related note, does OpenFire already support Carbon Copies?
On a side note, is there any chance that OpenFire and Spark will eventually support server-side chat transcripts?
Openfire supports Carbon Copies, and has been for a long time. I think support was added around 2014.
The monitoring plugin for Openfire adds server-sided chat transcripts (and has done so for ages), but Spark does not support that functionality yet (issue tracker).
So Carbon Copies are on the roadmap for Spark (but no ETA). Fabulous news.
My only remaining question then is whether support for server-side chat transcripts is also on the roadmap for Spark?
And do we have any realistic ETAs for either for this features? After waiting for 10 years for these functionalities, I’ll be excited if you tell me its within a year away.
I guess i should be careful mentioning stuff to not get someone over excited There is no ETA for any of these features and personally i don’t think they will be added soon. There are not much traction for Spark. Sometimes we get lucky, like with Spark UI refresh or one or another contributor adding patches for a month or so, but eventually they move on.
Carbons were almost added at some point. But it is not polished. Comment from SPARK-1585
Commenting on PR #420: Carbons kind of work in Spark. But only if you already have a chat window opened with a person you should receive carbons from/to. If the chat window is not opened, either nothing happens or Spark opens chat window with that person, but new messages are not appearing there.
As for server-side history, it is not on the roadmap. Actually we don’t have a proper roadmap at all. It is more a wishlist. If somebody contributes patches, it is getting added. There are no regular developers working on Spark for a long while.
There is no ETA for any of these features and personally i don’t think they will be added soon. There are not much traction for Spark. Sometimes we get lucky, like with Spark UI refresh or one or another contributor adding patches for a month or so, but eventually they move on.