The Ignite Realtime developer community is proud to announce the availability of Smack 4.4.0-alpha2 .

This is the second alpha release of the upcoming Smack 4.4 version. Users are encouraged to test this version in their development branches. We are happy about our feedback.

The Ignite Realtime Community is thrilled to announce the release of Openfire version 4.4.0. This is a major release featuring stability improvements and new features. You can find a full changelog listing over 100 Jira Issues resolved. Our beta announcement of this release highlighted some of the most significant changes. Of note is that this release should properly work with Java 11 and using OpenJDK as well. The minimum requirement is Java 8.

You can find downloads for Openfire with the following sha1sum values for the release artifacts.

c0d92cf54b02fe005b83a90256ddcfdfadad3c3c  openfire-4.4.0-1.i686.rpm
70b7570ae3f5ef48e3a2f4772dbeacaf22360b70  openfire-4.4.0-1.noarch.rpm
0ba75846af64b4379130b0b1835ba17899bb3593  openfire-4.4.0-1.x86_64.rpm
36cd9fd38e3840f9afa0d2cc5c86bbbe4a029569  openfire_4.4.0_all.deb
e4687a8f346741de9e4a502ddd63e2c55c7f4c3c  openfire_4_4_0_bundledJRE.exe
1437874597334f534e7d7882b02d550c3d5daec0  openfire_4_4_0_bundledJRE_x64.exe
8b579ca4441c6ca2502ffe9d2e3fdd27bc4190a6  openfire_4_4_0.dmg
e9b311e4d44b53f796a65c8f75abf4e39890dccb  openfire_4_4_0.exe
3205889dc1e7251b15d2dedacea3cfbbbf594810  openfire_4_4_0.tar.gz
00e1f28db47fd82653af6e1736bc036b344ecae2  openfire_4_4_0_x64.exe
e71edcf72f3baf3439aed46e0b8261d50d5aaa30  openfire_4_4_0.zip
285176004dccf7d07361064d558ee48579b65c5f  openfire_src_4_4_0.tar.gz
c4aab7c48b7a467dbec3b175ba21dc2a25539cf8  openfire_src_4_4_0.zip

The previous release of Openfire 4.3.2 was made on January 31rst, 2019 and here?s a simple accounting of the 100,000+ downloads made of the software!

Openfire Download Stats for Release: 4.3.2
             openfire-4.3.2-1.i686.rpm   2038
           openfire-4.3.2-1.noarch.rpm   2508
           openfire-4.3.2-1.x86_64.rpm   9869
                openfire_4.3.2_all.deb  18521
                    openfire_4_3_2.dmg   2406
                    openfire_4_3_2.exe   9492
                 openfire_4_3_2.tar.gz   6861
                    openfire_4_3_2.zip   2938
         openfire_4_3_2_bundledJRE.exe   4158
     openfire_4_3_2_bundledJRE_x64.exe  19909
                openfire_4_3_2_x64.exe  24528
             openfire_src_4_3_2.tar.gz    319
                openfire_src_4_3_2.zip    773
                                       ======
                                       104320

With the release, our Github master branch now reflects a future potential release version of Openfire 4.5.0 and we have also created a 4.4 branch signifying our intention to produce a 4.4.x series of bug fixes. We presently do not have plans of making a 4.3.3 release from the 4.3 branch.

Massive thanks for this release go to @gdt and @guus. They both did lots of great work knocking out some nagging issues and improving the already great administration console. It was also encouraging to see a number of first time contributors submitting pull requests with fixes and new features.

We certainly would encourage folks to test out the new release and report issues in the community forums. Please also free free to stop by our group chat and tell us now the new release is going. We are always looking for people interested in helping out with development, documentation, and testing.

Thank you for your support and usage of Openfire!

Last weekend, I participated in an XSF-community organized sprint, in The Hague (conveniently located in my country of residence). Graciously hosted by IPerity, a group of people from various XMPP related projects got together.

Apart from it always being nice to meet up with fellow enthusiasts, we got quite some work done. In the sprint preparation, we had already established that one of the topics that we?d like to address, was the lack of top-notch (mobile) client support, in XMPP world.

the-hague-2019.jpg1920×1440 359 KB

Much of the work that we did revolved around adding better support for client notifications. This lead pep. and Laszlo to build a prototype for browser-based push notifications, which they got working in Converse (the web client that Openfire ships in the ?inVerse? plugin) and the Prosody XMPP server. A goal for this effort is to evolve into a new XEP for web push.

Yours truly is happy to report that a new plugin was created for Openfire, that adds XEP-0357-defined push notifications to Openfire! The code is still somewhat rough around the edges, but I?d love for people to give this a test run, and how the prototype holds up!

Unrelated to the various notification-related efforts, Erik got quite a bit of work done on a refactoring project in the Gajim client, which over the past weekend is growing to be the basis for a refactoring of Gajim?s chat window UI.

I?m thrilled by the prospect of hosting a major, hopefully Openfire-based, hackathon in the near future, that is geared towards a particular industry in the Netherlands. That might be an exciting precursor for another increase in XMPP utilization! More on that later though!

I?ve had a blast! I loved meeting up with everyone, and enjoyed the discussions we had. Let?s do this again, soon!

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