Xep-0136

Hi,

I noticed that the last openfire version (3.8.1) offers support for XEP-0136 as part of the monitoring plugin: http://svn.igniterealtime.org/svn/repos/openfire/trunk/src/plugins/monitoring/

I was wondering if there is anything in SMACK to address XEP-0136, or are there any plans regarding on XEP-0136 support in SMACK.

Thanks,

Mircea

There is nothing logged in Jira right now, but I am not sure if it should be added at this point due to the notice in the Introduction section of the spec itself.

“Notice (2010-06-21): The XMPP Council [1] believes that the Message Archiving protocol is unduly complex and will likely request a thorough review and simplification of this specification before advancing it to Final.”

It looks like it is bound to change fairly drastically in the future, so it would probably be best to wait until that occurs. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes obsolete and is replaced with something different altogether.

I am willing to add a task for it, if someone wants to take it on, but I think with that warning, it would be folly to put it in the main project.

On the Openfire side I believe the newly combined monitoring / archiving plugin supports XEP-0136. If that is the case we would be interested in supporting the same protocol on the SMACK / SPARK side, unless someone is interested and able to assist creating a new OF plugin that supports the simplified protocol.

I think the new protocol the XMPP Council refers to is defined here: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html. This is still in the experimental track.

I believe you are correct on the plugin side, although OF-427 is still open, so unless that is an oversight what you want might not be achievable anyway.

As for support in Smack, I am OK with adding the code, but not in the two main existing projects (smack and smackx). I plan on creating another project to support the addition of ‘not production ready or recommended code’. This is basically meant to to house support for protocols that have not yet reached the Draft status. Although this extension did reach that status, it has effectively been pulled with that note. I pulled one contribution from the next release for this reason.

I wil add a Jira task with this explanation.

Ok, that makes sense. Others did a lot more work and testing on the new monitoring plugin and the thread is here: http://community.igniterealtime.org/thread/48517. Maybe someone could report back some more test results. I would think that OF-427 should be closed; it is based on a thread that is not very helpful. We will do some testing on the new plugin shortly and report back. For us this is a safer bet to implement, especially since the plugin already exists and XEP-136 is stable, as compared to XEP-313, which looks quite immature still. Neither protocol version seems to have a lot of clients supporting it, even though this is a key feature as soon as you use several clients or mix with Web based clients and want a consistent archive. The use cases defined in XEP-313 though are the ones we will use with XEP-136.

Added SMACK-435