Hi there, I'm Smack's new maintainer. Some of you may know me already as the maintainer of aSmack, the Android port of Smack. I first like to thank Robin for his work on Smack in the past.
Smack has a long development history. The first recorded commit dates back to Jan 13 2003. Now, over 11 years later, we are going make fundamental changes to Smack in order to ensure that it will last another decade.
Most importantly: Ignite Realtime is applying as Google Summer of Code organization. We propose a project to modernize andmodularize Smacks build system. One reason why this is necessary, is that we want Smack to be able to target Java SE and Android. Read more about it here.
Smacks SVN repository has been migrated to git, and the code is now hosted on GitHub. We are currently evaluating hosting the code in our own Atlassian Stash, but that isn't decided yet and is not a high priority right now.
Let's have a look at Smack's contributors of the last 11 years:
513 Gaston Dombiak
474 Matt Tucker
123 rcollier
105 Thiago Camargo
104 Florian Schmaus
69 Alex Wenckus
46 Bill Lynch
43 Derek DeMoro
24 Günther Niess
15 Daniel Henninger
12 Henning Staib
11 loki
7 Michael Will
7 Wolf Posdorfer
7 guus
6 Holger Bergunde
6 Jeff Williams
5 Jay Kline
4 Marilyn Daum
3 Francisco Vives
2 bruce
1 (no author)
1 Andrew Wright
1 Pete Matern
1 Tim Jentz
1 root
Hopefully this list will grow over the time. If you'd like to contribute bigger patches to Smack, please consult the developers. Either via IRC #smack (freenode) or via the developers forum. All patches will be reviewed, since there are usually a few things that should be improved before the commit is ready for Smack's master branch. Make also sure to read the Guidelines for Smack Developers and Contributors.
Besides the GSOC project, there are more goodies in the queue, like XEP-0198 Stream Mangament and Roster Versioning.
We also work on migrating the build system to gradle, including deployments to sonatype/maven central. I expect the next release to be available as jar and via maven central.
Finally, shortly after the 3.4.0 release, a memory leak was reported in the forum. The cause was , and a fixed nighlty release was made availabe shortly after. I am going to use this importand fix as reason to release Smack 3.4.1 today, in order to get familar with the release process of Smack.