In January 2007, Ignite Realtime released the red5 plugin for Openfire which added the flash based open source Red5 media server as a plugin to Openfire (Wildfire). A year later, we added red5Phone, the first open source SIP based soft phone in a web browser.
Eighteen years later, WebRTC is now well established as the leading standard for audio and video conferencing and all that leading edge pioneer work here at Ignite evolved into Pàdé the web client, it’s supporting Openfire plugin and other plugins and clients supporting other audio and video use cases beyond meetings.
XMPP is now back in fashion and Openfire has always been a choice XMPP solution because it has the X factor. It is eXperienced, eXtensible, fleXible, eXperimental and eXciting and allowing use to easily integrate it with a wider diversity of signalling and media protocols and services.
However, the new attraction for XMPP is the push for open standards and messaging interoperability. Consequently, being able to also provide media (audio and video) interoperability in XMPP through Openfire will become one of the things we choose to focus on at Ignite going forward with audio and video communications. As previously hinted, we are moving forward with simplified, easy to maintain open standards that make media interoperability possible.
For now, that will be Online Meetings for audio and video conferencing services that have a web front end UI like Jitsi, Galene and BroadcastBox. For deeper integration into XMPP, that will be the Media Streams which is the XMPP wrapper to WHIP and WHEP.
In practice, it means development will stop on the Pade plugin for Openfire and all Jitsi based development and integration will only continue with Openfire Meetings plugin (ofmeet) which will become XEP 483 compliant. The Galene plugin for Openfire will also become XEP 483 compliant and both plugins can serve the new Online Meetings plugin for in ConverseJS web client.
The Openfire plugin called Ohun for audio conferencing is deprecated and a new plugin called OrinAyo which supports both music streaming and audio conferencing is in development and will become available very soon.
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Dele for doing all this for so long. I am also proud to have been part of the whole story starting with your red5.jar plugin and then always exposing your latest webRTC plugins so anyone can try it. I will move all my existing installations and my customers from Padé to openfire meetings soon.