After 3 years of wait, finally a new release of Spark instant messenger – 2.9.0. With improved certificates management, HTTP File Upload support, new Smack version, lots of bug fixes and other improvements.
Full changelog is awailable at http://www.igniterealtime.org/builds/spark/docs/latest/changelog.html
It’s a common question at IgniteRealtime.org (forums or chat room) – “Is there a guide to setup everything?”. Better yet, this guide should be easy to follow. There is no such guide. Well, at least from the community itself. I’ve seen a few guides in the wild. One of the recent ones is about combining Openfire with ClearOS and Openfire Meetings, which is an overkill for a novice user wanting to just setup an IM server. Some other guides are lacking details or are old. There are hundreds of possible setups, with different network schemes, operating systems, etc. It is impossible to write a simple guide and combine all this information. It will be hundreds of pages long. So i will take a very simple scenario and write a guide based on it. I hope one would be able to use it as a base for other scenarios. I will touch some crucial complex parts a little just to point that they are there and are important, but i won’t go into much detail (especially that i don’t have deep expertize on them).
This guide is for the latest official version of Openfire (4.1.3) and Spark (2.8.3) at the point when writing this guide. Based on Windows operating system (both server and clients). No LDAP integration. No external database. Just as simple as possible internal IM server. Read More