I have contacted Armando (the current SparkWeb project lead) last week. SparkWeb is not his primary work, so he has not much time to work with it. He said he has plans to work on SparkWeb and apply some patches soon, but i cant give you any time frame. So. SparkWeb is not dead yet. Not very active though.
And if you contact Armando’s again pass along my appreciation for his work on the project.
SparkWeb is quite usable as it is but I am planing on rolling out a chat client to 500 call center agents and I would hate to choose a client that is not being developed. Spark is another option but if I can avoid installing software on 500 desktops so much the better.
Write a plugin that implements a web service, see Webchat and Redfire plugins for example and host the files.
Host the files on an Apache server and direct http-bind requests to Openfire on port 7070. Google for examples of how this is done with jwchat or other javascript based xmpp clients.