Release of Spark 2.6.3

Posted by Walter Ebeling

Jun 28, 2011

Dear Community,

due to several issues, we have released a 2.6.3 on July 1st. The following issues were fixed

SPARK-1383Login screen shows disabled fields.
SPARK-1394 Search in history is not working
SPARK-1395 NPE when exiting a chat window with ESC
SPARK-1396 Send Broadcast Window doesnt show when not using JTattoo
SPARK-1379 Support for XEP-0147 (URI handling)
SPARK-1392 Check if Spark is really checking for updates even if that option is turned off

A new Feature was added:

Expand ability to customize spark if you want to build your own branded version

You can download the release in the download section of the igniterealtime web site.

The Spark development will be reduced until the 4th quarter this year.

There has been a significant demand for help about the packaging of custom editions for Spark. I would like to ask all users who have done custom packages to report their approach in the forum. The project files of the packager (e.g. appdeploy) are really welcome.

Walter Ebeling

Jappix for Openfire plugin

Posted by Dele Olajide

Jun 26, 2011

I really like Jappix. It ia fully functional XMPP web client with a lot of features and even looks like Sparkweb

It has a cool microblog feature like onesocialweb similiar to the one I implemented on a comercial version of SparkWeb using XMPP pubsub. As much as I liked Jappix, I really could not use it. It was developed in PHP and required a second web server with too much fiddly configuration to make Openfire HTTP-BIND run the cross-domain gauntlet. Well that all changed when I discovered Quercus: Caucho Technology's fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language.

It has enabled me to create an Openfire plugin for Jappix that works out-of-the box. No configuration required.

The main reason for my interest in Jappix was the minichat feature which is like the Facebook IM User Interface and is best for integration with other web applications. I have an immediate requirement to put IM into my Clearspace/Openfire setup and Jappix was just right for this.

I am posting this here for community members who might have a need for it. I do not plan on doing any development work on the Jappix PHP code, so if you spot a fault, head over to the Jappix project web site and report it. Please don't email me.

How to install and use

Download the appropiate zip file for your Openfire server
Stop Openfire
Unzip jappix.war and copy to your plugins folder
Restart Openfire
Go to http://your-server:7070/jappix

How to access the Jappix Admin Console

Delete the contents of the OPENFIRE_HOME\plugins\jappix\store folder
Go to http://YOUR_SERVER:7070/jappix

References

Download for Openfire-Jappix is http://code.google.com/p/openfire-jappix/downloads/list

Source code is http://code.google.com/p/openfire-jappix/source/checkout

Project Jappix is https://project.jappix.com/

Project Quercus is http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/

Release of Spark 2.6.2

Posted by Walter Ebeling

Jun 22, 2011

The community is happy to report that Spark 2.6.2 has reached final status. The release contains several bug fixes and new features and enhancements for Spark. It is a hot fix release for a regression bug introduced in 2.6.1. Details can be found in the changelog.

Main features for this release are:

OTR (off-the-record) support for encrypted chat between clients
New notification mechanism
New splash screen
Support for animated GIF as avatar
Plugin blacklisting
Documentation for Spark customizing (lot's of option now)

More than 30 bugs were fixed, including

New default look and feel for Mac
File transfer is using IBB as fall back for VPN network connections
Scroll to end in chat window

The downloads for all supported plattforms can be found in the download section of Igniterealtime.org.

Red5 is not included in the release as well as games were not included. These can be found in the forum for those of you interested.

A big "Thank You" to Holger and Wolf who spend numerous hours in writing features and debugging code. And of course to all the users who have reported issues, provided feedback and contributed code.

Walter Ebeling

Moving SparkWeb Forward

Posted by Dele Olajide

Jun 3, 2011

This is an update from ignite realtime community about where we are with SparkWeb

There is an Open Source HTML version of SparkWeb based on the original commercial Jive Software version and now released under the Apache 2.0 license just like Spark and Openfire. It can be found on the ignite realtime community here.

Knight Raider has worked on the Flash version of SparkWeb and has made it compatible with the ignite realtime latest version of XIFF. His version compiles with Flex Builder using Flex SDK 3.0 for Flash Player 9 and above. It can be found on the ignite realtime community here.

I have made a few more changes to make it compile with the latest Flex SDK 4.5 for current Flash Player 10.3 and above and uploaded it to the SparkWeb SVN. The code can be checked out using

https://svn.igniterealtime.org/svn/repos/sparkweb/trunk/SparkWeb2

Knight Raider has volunteered to work on this. We plan to to add Jingle-based audio, video, file transfer, screen sharing, etc and make it look better than this

Finally, work has started on RedSpark which is yet another web client for Spark, but is tightly integrated into Redfire and will be compatible with the Redfire plugin for Spark. It is extending XIFF with the new RTMP/RTMFP connection classes and has a Facebook/Google type chat user interface that combines both HTML5 and Flash to support a softphone (red5phone), audio/video in both 2-way and multi-user chat with screen sharing (red5-screenshare) and p2p file transfer using RTMFP.

Ignite Realtime Blog