The Ignite Realtime community has just released Spark 2.8.1 and it can be downloaded from Ignite Realtime: Downloads .

This is a bugfix release for 2.8.0, which has introduced a huge overhaul and created a few new issues. Many users had problems with login after upgrading to 2.8.0. This won't change with 2.8.1. It is not a bug, but rather an incorrect setup. Admittedly, this was introduced because of lack of security check in older Spark\Smack versions. But we can't leave Spark blind to bad or forged certificates (in the age of security breaches and moving all the web to TLS). So, if you have this problems, please read Login issues since Spark 2.8.0 . 2.8.1 is introducing an option "Disable certificate hostname verification (not recommended)" in the Advanced settings of the Login screen. If you can't fix your setup or want a temporary workaround, you can use it. But be warned, that you will make yourself (or your users) less secure. 2.8.0 also introduced new setting "Accept all certificates" in the same place. It was enabled by default for those upgrading from 2.7.7. It automatically accepts self-signed and some other incorrect certificates (expired, etc.). This was done to make 2.8.0 backwards compatible, if you were using self-signed certificates provided by Openfire. This setting will stay enabled after 2.8.1 update. But there is a plan to make it disabled by default for new installations in 2.8.2 version.

For a complete list of changes please check Spark Changelog

As usually we encourage new developers to join Spark project and provide patches. Those familiar with Smack can join the development easier, as we are now using the latest version. Patches can be attached in the forums or submitted as PRs on GitHub.

Here are the contributors to this release (besides myself):

nicoben (Nico Ben) · GitHub  updated Italian translation

speedy  added option to login with not matching certificate's hostname, fixed showing incorrect errors when logging in and empty profile fields issue

Alexander198961 (Aleksander Kovtunenko) · GitHub  fixed links opening in KDE environment

Guus der Kinderen  fixed various parts of Spark to behave correctly or log errors

Important information for SSO (Single Sign On) users, if they are using SRV records:SSO (Single Sign On) configuration changes since Spark 2.8.0

[SIP phone] SIP plugin is not working since the Smack 4 update.

[Voice Chat] Jingle (PC to PC) calls are not working at this point.

[Linux] Flashing plugin is not working on Linux systems.

Here are sha1 checksums for the downloads:

7ab1df8764529b8bfc070b259878470ccbd7640c spark_2_8_1.dmg

bbd029caeb12fc4d9ea6e87b37a5f0377c6a1c29  spark_2_8_1.exe

41b485146393a38966b2eecb832c795b0f0915a8  spark_2_8_1_online.exe

6c68f083d2e6e303e679b614f10536e4563d272c  spark_2_8_1.tar.gz

751721d241d880d9b7772038ec030230b4ccbb38  spark-2.8.1.rpm

c264ccb4e16b401a1814c43342f31a0a3cf36cc6  spark-2.8.1.src.rpm

91a6dfaaf63ca96a5c69b4eb825d2539adffc1b1  spark_2.8.1.deb

A few months ago, I wrote about the relocation of our community. The bits and bolts that power our community have since been migrated, and all is running wel. During that progress, we had a couple of awkward moments along the lines of: "to whom will Jive transfer ownership of the DNS records for Ignite?" We started discussing that topic, and concluded that it would be good to have a legal entity to represent our community.

We've been working on a plan ever since, that today, I'd like to share with you. We're planning to start a foundation, the Ignite Realtime Foundation. Its objective: to promote, support and advance development of software in the Ignite Realtime Open Source community.

If you're interested in this effort, have questions, or want to contribute in effort or resources, please reach out. We've set up a new chat room at irf@conference.igniterealtime.org that we use for discussions on the subject.

Lately, I have stared to use Spark client again alongside Skype for Business which I use daily for my professional work. My renewed interest in Spark came initially to have a look at the hard workwroot, guus and the rest of the igniterealtime community had put into Spark 2.8.1 and also to access the chat rooms at igniterealtime, especially the IRF.

I use Openfire Meetings myself from time to time and had developed a basic plugin for Spark that allows users to join audio and video conferences hosted by Openfire Meetings. See the documentation for more details. It provides a button from a Multi User Chat (MUC) room or chat window within the Spark client, to open a Chrome window using the same URL as the Jitsi Meet web client. It therefore assumes you have Chrome installed and configured as your default browser. It works, but the user experience is not ideal.

I had done some work with Java Chrome Embedded  Framework (java-cef) a while back and decided to use it directly instead of depending on Chrome installed and configured as the default browser. I spent my weekend working on it and this what I have to show for my effort

It is a much better user experience than opening a Chrome browser window out of context somewhere else. Like everything in life, there is a price to pay. It does not do screen sharing and does not work on OSX. (don't know how to configure java-cef for OSX). I have tested it at home on my windows win32 desktop and will test it tomorrow at work on my win64 desktop. I would appreciate any feedback from Linux users.

The source code is on the Ignite Realtime GitHub repo and PRs are welcome especially to make it work on Macs (OSX)

If you want to download the built plugin to test, download from here.

A critical security vulnerability has been found in Smack. Please upgrade immediately to Smack 4.1.9. Like all Smack releases with the same major and minor version numbers, 4.1.9 is a drop in replacement for all Smack 4.1 releases. Smack 4.1.9 is available on Maven Central.

The Ignite Realtime community would like to thank Sylvain Sarméjeanne for discovering and reporting the vulnerability to security@igniterealtime.org.

The Ignite Realtime community has just released Spark 2.8.2 and it can be downloaded from Ignite Realtime: Downloads .

This is a regular update. But there is a change, which can affect new users. "Accept all certificates" option on the Adanced menu on the Login screen won't be enabled by default for new users from now on. This option makes Spark automatically accept expired, self-signed and other incorrect TLS certificates. Which makes it less secure. If you are using self-signed certificates, your new users will have to enable this option manually (once). Or you can add this option to a preconfigured spark.properties file, if you distribute it to new users. Old users won't be affected by this (those upgrading straight from 2.7 version will still be affected). We encourage server admins to use certificates from trusted authorities (e.g. Let's Encrypt). This version also includes 4.1.9 update for Smack, which has a fix for a critical security vulnerability.

UPDATE (2016/11/29):it looks like Spark is not saving settings on Advanced menu, if a user has never opened it. For such users "Accept all certificates" setting will be disabled after updating to 2.8.2 from any version. They will have to go to Advanced menu and enable it, if they encounter "Unable to verify a certificate" error.

Those who are using Client Control plugin will have to update it to version 2.1.0 as Spark 2.8.2 is already modified to work with that version and it will miss many menus and checkboxes if being used with an older version of that plugin. 2.1.0 version requires Openfire 4.0.0 at least. If you are using older version of Openfire and want to keep using Client Control, you might want to hold of updating to Spark 2.8.2.

We also would like to mention SparkMeet plugin provided by our long time contributor Dele Olajide. Hopefully we will find a way to bundle this plugin with Spark or provide other options to use it. You can also vote here and tell what you think about it. Initial commit is done and its in Spark's source code sparkmeet plugin - initial release by deleolajide · Pull Request #253 · igniterealtime/Spark · GitHub.

For a complete list of changes please check Spark Changelog

As usually we encourage new developers to join Spark project and provide patches. Those familiar with Smack can join the development easier, as we are now using the latest stable version (4.1.9). Patches can be attached in the forums or submitted as PRs on GitHub.

Here are the contributors to this release (besides myself):

freeseawind · GitHub  contributed new skin for Spark - LittleLuck

Alexander198961 (Aleksander Kovtunenko) · GitHub  fixed the issue with Spark freezing on exit because of a faulty plugin

Michael  added more settings to default.properties and Client Control plugin, fixed showing of an empty Unfiled group and a few other issues

Martini26  updated Polish translation

speedy  fixed an issue with systray icon switching to regular one when it should be DND or Away and a few issues with invisible mode

nicoben (Nico Ben) · GitHub  updated Italian translation

Here are sha1 checksums for the downloads:

7a45319a723368b6c830a1c1a7287fb207140b4f spark_2_8_2.dmg

dd9c533868d42fc0ef651d544f463ff1fba5d21c  spark_2_8_2.exe

fb324011e7f1a61b5e793b2c6b1778306bf19102  spark_2_8_2_online.exe

20dbc5940a450ab3176f1dcf4d4dfd01f90b4b06  spark_2_8_2.tar.gz

813e110f6715f7f72af28e2ee90ed2bd9fa11005  spark-2.8.2.rpm

1409189a0877a203ef3fe16410a520056fe214d7  spark-2.8.2.src.rpm

565ff2947b4cca69f73f6818f18d49571db6bf78  spark_2.8.2.deb

The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the 4.0.4 release of Openfire.  Openfire is a cross-platform real-time collaboration server based on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol. This release signifies our ongoing effort to produce a stable 4.0 series release while continuing to work toward a 4.1 release. A changelog of fixes is available and indicates 16 issues resolved.

As always, please report issues in the Community Forums and you can download this release from our website.  Here are the sha1sum's for the downloads available.

As a reminder, Openfire's source code and development can be found on Github and an active developer discussion occurs within our open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org groupchat.  Please consider helping out with Openfire's development!  We can use help in about all areas of development, but especially:

• experienced packaging developers to improve the install/upgrade experience on various platforms
• developers interested in transitioning Openfire to Maven
• testing of bamboo generated builds

Thank you for your interest in Openfire!

A Year and a Day - TV Tropes

On the 13th of December, 2015, we released Openfire 4.0.0 Beta.

Now, a year later, we have a new Beta to try. This one has numerous major security fixes and enhancements, and a huge long Openfire Changelog to read through.

Please do try this, but not in production of course. Unless you're a mad and crazy bunch, like we are. You can download it from here:

Ignite Realtime: Beta Downloads

As a reminder, Openfire's source code and development can be found on Github and an active developer discussion occurs within our open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org groupchat.  Please consider helping out with Openfire's development!  We can use help in about all areas of development, but especially:

• experienced packaging developers to improve the install/upgrade experience on various platforms
• developers interested in transitioning Openfire to Maven
• testing of Bamboo generated builds

Thank you for your interest in Openfire!

Christmas has come early.

Our github repository - GitHub - igniterealtime/Openfire: A XMPP server licensed under the Open Source Apache License. - reached a thousand and one stars today, so we've celebrated by releasing Openfire 4.1.0, containing over 150 fixes and new features. I feel I should personally thank Daryl Herzmann and Guus der Kinderen in particular for the gargantuan effort they've both put into this release, but we're also very lucky to have a large number of developers within the community providing us with high-quality patches via Pull Requests. This is, once again, a huge collective effort.

Changlog: Openfire Changelog

You can download it from here:

Ignite Realtime: Downloads

As a reminder, Openfire's source code and development can be found on Github and an active developer discussion occurs within our open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org groupchat.  Please consider helping out with Openfire's development!  We can use help in about all areas of development, but especially:

• experienced packaging developers to improve the install/upgrade experience on various platforms
• developers interested in transitioning Openfire to Maven
• testing of Bamboo generated builds

Thank you for your interest in Openfire!

The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the release of Openfire 4.1.1.  This release contains a few database related bugfixes that only impacted those who upgraded to 4.1.0 and particularly those using MySQL or SQL Server databases.

You can download it from here:

Ignite Realtime: Downloads

As a reminder, Openfire's source code and development can be found on Github and an active developer discussion occurs within our open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org groupchat.  Please consider helping out with Openfire's development!

As always, please report issues in the Community Forums and thanks for your interest in Openfire.

The Ignite Realtime community is proud to announce that nearly 2 years after the release of Smack 4.1, the first Release Candidate (RC) of Smack 4.2 has been uploaded to Maven Central. Smack 4.2 marks another milestone in the development of Smack. With the availability of the first RC, the API of Smack 4.2 was sealed. This means that now is the ideal time for Smack users to adopt their codebase to the new Smack 4.2 API, and eventually start using Smack 4.2 in the experimental/development branch of their codebase. Please consult the Smack 4.2 Readme and Upgrade Guide for more information.

I'd like to use this post also to draw your attention at a very important topic. The codebase of smack-core and -tcp has grown historically over the past 15 years. This is not an issue per se. Smack was well designed from the beginning, is now modular and not affected by bit rot. But especially on important class, namely XMPPTCPConnection, has come to age. It is based on threads, when it should use NIO. It uses triggers for state changes, when it should be designed as finite state machine. And some more. I know that a lot of people are affected by Smack creating at least 2 threads per connection (instead of using NIO). This all also contributed at some amount to the latest security vulnerability found in Smack (SMACK-739 / CVE 2016-10027).

The only solution to tackle this would be to re-implement the affected code from scratch. But needles to say that this also would require funding, as it is not a simple one weekend task. I hope to have the resource to do this at some point in the future. If you think you can help, or know someone who possibly would be interested support the funding, then please contact me.

The Ignite Realtime community has just released Spark 2.8.3 and it can be downloaded from the Ignite Realtime: Downloads

This is a regular update. A few issues have been fixed. Bundled Java updated to the latest version. There is a new menu to view history of sent broadcasts and an option to login anonymously.

For a complete list of changes please check the Spark Changelog

We encourage developers to get involved with Spark project by providing feedback and patches in the forums or submitting pull requests to GitHub - igniterealtime/Spark: Cross-platform real-time collaboration client optimized for business and organizations.

Here is the list of contributors to this release (besides myself):

Michael  - fixed Advanced settings not being saved without opening that menu, always on top issue and changed behavior when Auto Login is hidden

Alexander198961 (Aleksander Kovtunenko) · GitHub  - added a feature to save broadcasts history and access it via a new menu option

Jerry  - added support for anonymous login

Guus der Kinderen  - fixed issue when joining a room with a duplicate nickname and improved build time by removing unneeded code style checks

Daryl Herzmann  - helped to clean up the code further (removing legacy CVS keywords)

speedy  - fixed issues with password not being deleted when it should and added log file rotating by size

Atalanttore (Ettore Atalan) · GitHub  - updated German translation

Here are sha1 checksums for the downloads:

b07a990109ec934e673e2bcb41a6be81a44e6131  spark_2_8_3.dmg

839226d42cea7778961d525a63c4a27c0f269250  spark_2_8_3.exe

526c46faafe3baf8c78bc69a024cfd752da57123  spark_2_8_3_online.exe

06542cac2db2611e3fcfcf7741fcfe242aa98d9f  spark_2_8_3.tar.gz

ea4bb09c4b55d102f69f974418a06a5c820b37c3  spark-2.8.3.rpm

9917c48e393e215c9aa1d14606b70dcb8531baf9  spark-2.8.3.src.rpm

6b6adbed00935cd01155355b796d4c504d49c18f  spark_2.8.3.deb

I am happy to announce that we are bringing back one of our older projects from the grave: the Asterisk-IM project! This project was started in 2005 by Jive Software, and can be used to integrate the Asterisk platform in Openfire. Due to a lack of manpower over the last few years, development stalled. No longer!

We have found the most excellent Marcelo Terres willing and able to take on the reigns as project lead for the project! Simultaneously a code contribution by Ron Arts brought back compatibility of the Asterisk-IM source code with both recent versions of Openfire, as well as Asterisk 13 - but more on that later, from Marcelo.

I am more than confident that the project is in good hands with Marcelo. Not only has Marcelo been a active manager of the primarily Brazilian-based Openfire community, he is heavily involved in the Asterisk project, going as far as to speaking on AstriCon 2016.

As of now, we restored references to the project in our Ignite Realtime community. There is some more work to be done: downloads still point to an older release, and we might be lacking a bit of project infrastructure (such as an issue tracker, dedicated community forum, etc), but I'll leave that to Marcelo to put in place as he sees fit.

Marcelo, thanks for doing this! I'm excited to have you on board (as far as you weren't already)!

I've just released Smack 4.2.0-rc3 to Maven Central. Smack 4.2.0 is scheduled to be released early Q2 2017, according to Smack's release life cycle. And right now, it looks like the train is right on time.

The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the availability of version 4.1.2 of Openfire. This release signifies our ongoing effort to produce a stable 4.1 series while effort is made on new features and functionality in Openfire 4.2.  You can find a release changelog denoting the 13 Jira issues resolved in this release.  If you had issues with inconsistent appearance of groups, do please test this release to see if those issues are now resolved. You can download the release from our website here and the sha1sum's for the available artifacts are as follows.

[1] We recently migrated to storing our release artifacts on Github and thanks to their API, we can get metrics on how many times the artifact was downloaded.

As a reminder, our development of Openfire happens on Github and we have an active MUC development chat hosted at open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org . We are always looking for more folks interested in helping out, so please consider pitching in!

As always, please report any issues in the Community Forums and thanks for using Openfire!

I am trying to build a new web based client for Openfire to replace the outdated and abandoned Flash-based Sparkweb. The project is called Pade (A Yoruba word for Meeting) and my first step was to decide on my web client API.

Representational state transfer (REST) has now become the standard for abstracting request/response type web services into an API. When it is combined with Server Sent Events (otherwise known as Event Source), the result is a fresh new way of providing two-way real-time communication between web clients and a server using synchronous requests/responses (IQ) with REST and asynchronous evening (Message, Presence) with SSE. The really cool feature of SSE is the automatic re-connection by the web browser.

The Rest API plugin by Redor is brilliant . It allows you to administer Openfire via a RESTful API. Most of the common functions we do from the Openfire admin console web application can now be automated and integrated into server-side Java plugins or client-side web applications with ease. After spending hours inside the code and extending it for use at work to manage all the telephony entities we use with our Openlink XEP from the various commercial plugins we develop, it became clear that REST+SSE is the way forward for web-based real time messaging. Don't take my work for it. Read what the folks at erlang-solutions.com have to say.

As my first step towards implementing Pade, I have built a Chat API plugin by extending the REST API plugin with SSE and Jetty web authentication taken from the Openfire meetings plugin. The plugin now runs on the HTTP-BIND (7070/7443) port instead of the admin (9090/9091) port. It authenticates you as an Openfire user once and reuses the authentication for REST,  SSE and XMPP bosh/websockets. It supports everything you can do with the REST API plus Bookmarks and SIP Accounts as an admin user. It then enables you as a normal user to handle presence, chat, groupchat, contacts and users with just a handful of REST requests and SSE events.

broadcast own presence

POST /chat/presence

seach for domain users

GET /chat/users

retrieve,add,remove contacts

GET /chat/contacts

POST /chat/contacts/{contactJID}

DELETE /chat/contacts/{contactJID}

retrieve old messages and post new message

GET /chat/messages

POST /chat/messages/user@domain

retrieve, join, post messages, invite and leave muc rooms

GET /chat/rooms

PUT /chat/rooms/{roomName}

POST /chat/rooms/{roomName}

POST /chat/rooms/{roomName}/{contactJID}

DELETE /chat/rooms/{roomName}

create/update own user profile properties

POST /chat/users/{propertyName}

delete own user profile properties

DELETE /chat/users/{propertyName}

send a raw XMPP message to openfire

POST /chat/xmpp

Most of our projects have a long history. This certainly goes for Spark, which was created over ten years ago. Although many of you are actively using Spark today, it is beginning to show its age. This is something that we have been planning to address for a while now.

Spark was created around the same time that the Kyoto protocol went into effect, Pluto got demoted to the status of 'dwarf planet' and Italy won the FIFA world cup in Germany. Thereabouts.

Since then, source code development tooling has improved a lot. Today, the Spark project is struggling to find active contributors. We believe that one of the reasons for this is that it's pretty hard for developers (especially those that are used to work with modern tooling) to get started with our project. We have been working on that. First, we moved all of our projects from our old Subversion repository to Github. We have noticed that this dramatically improved the accessibility of our code. Second, Smack 4 happened, bringing the backbone of Spark back up-to-date.

Now, we are addressing the structure of the project itself. We will restructure the project as a Apache Maven project. This will bring a good deal of predictable structure to the project, which has many benefits. One of these is that the project will integrate easily with various development tools.

Moving Spark from its existent Ant-based structure to a Maven structure is no small task. There is no one right way of doing this. We have given it a shot, and have created a structure that we think is very workable. Before committing to this structure, we would very much invite others to have a look, and comment on what we've done. The reasoning behind this is simple: once we've committed to a particular structure, it will be disruptive to change it. If we want to apply improvements, we should do so now.

Please, review our new project structure, and let us know what you think. You can find the new structure in the SPARK-1791_Maven branch on Github.

Ask yourselves: does this structure help me? Is it easier to compile the source code? Can I integrate it with my IDE of choice without too much trouble? Can I create new plugins? Does the new structure introduce a problem that needs to be addressed before committing? Can it be improved? We welcome all feedback!

The Ignite Realtime Community is pleased to announce the 4.1.3 release of Openfire.  This release signifies our continued effort to have a stable 4.1 release series while work progresses on the next major release.  This release hopefully resolves the roster groupissues noticed in Openfire since the 4.1.0 release.

You can find our release builds here and this is a listing of sha1sums and an accounting of previous version downloads.

As a reminder, our development of Openfire happens on Github and we have an active MUC development chat hosted at  open_chat@conference.igniterealtime.org. We are always looking for more folks interested in helping out, so please consider pitching in!

As always, please report any issues in the Community Forums and thanks for using Openfire!

I have added Kaiwa XMPP web client to the Chat API plugin. I hope to extend it with the audio/video conferencing stuff from Openfire Meetings later on.

First time you use it (https://your_server:7443/apps), you will get a prompt to enter your Openfire username/password. It works best with the websocket plugin.

For many years now, Google is orchestrating its "Summer of Code" program. GSoC aims to bring student developers into the open source community, during the summer holidays.

As it did before, the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) will act as an umbrella organisation for this years edition of GSoC. The Ignite Realtime community is open to accept students under this umbrella.

If you're a student and interested in working on one of our projects as part of GSoC, you should get in contact! We've prepared a number of teaser tasks as well as project ideas, all of which are available in the XSF wiki.

Chrome version 57 makes a breaking change to webrtc that breaks Openfire Meetings. For details, read this.

You can apply a work-around by using the meetings settings admin web page to force a "negotiate" rtcpMuxPolicy as shown in the screen shot below.

Otherwise, upgrade to version 0.3.29 from github here.

The 0.4.x branch is now up-to-date with the latest Jitsi code including the mobile Jitsi-Meet applications for iPhone and Android. It can be previewed from here. It is still work in progress. If you test it with the mobile app, enter the full URL of your Jitsi-Meet application (https://<your-server>:7443/ofmeet/jitsi-meet/<room name>) and ensure your Openfire allows anonymous xmpp connections.