Open Realtime
Ignite Realtime is the community site for the users and developers of open source Real Time Communications projects like Openfire, Smack, Spark, and Pàdé. Your involvement is helping to change the open RTC landscape.
The IgniteRealtime community is happy to announce releases for two of its projects! Both are for XMPP-libraries that we produce.
Tinder is a Java based XMPP library, providing an implementation for XMPP stanzas and components. Tinder’s origins lie in code that’s shared between our Openfire and Whack implementations. The implementation that’s provided in Tinder hasn’t been written again from scratch. Instead, code has been moved from the original projects into Tinder, preserving al of the existing features and functionality.
The v2.1.0 release of Tinder is a maintenance release. It updates various libraries that are used by Tinder, and removes deprecated, unused code. Tinder now requires Java 11 or later. The full list of changes in this release can be found in the release notes.
Whack is a Java library that easily allows the creation of external components that follow the XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol. This library allows you to create server-sided components of your XMPP network that can run as stand-alone processes. That’s particularly useful when you are creating functionality for which scalability configuration differs from that of Openfire, or if you want to re-use your component for XMPP servers other than Openfire!
The v3.0.0 release of Whack is a maintenance release. It improves reconnection logic (when connection to the XMPP server is lost), it no longer ships with an embedded webserver (that was old, unused, and was raising vulnerability warnings, and updates some libraries (such as Tinder) to more recent versions. The fulll list of chagnes in this release can be found in the release notes.
We would love to hear from you! If you have any questions, please stop by our community forum or our live groupchat.
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When I explain to others what I do for a living, I often ask why it is that we are not surprised that one can use a Gmail account to send an email to someone who uses an Outlook account, yet many people fully accept that you can’t send a message to someone using WhatsApp from a Telegram account. We’re not surprised that we can use our phone to set up a call with someone who uses a different brand of phone (or is subscribed to a different provider), yet, for instant messaging, we find ourselves in a world of walled gardens.
Walled gardens refer to ecosystems where companies control access to their platforms and restrict users’ ability to freely interact with other services, creating barriers that prevent open communication and fair competition.
Recognizing this, legislation is slowly being put in place to improve things. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is a regulatory framework established aimed at ensuring fair competition and improving the functioning of the digital economy. One of its primary objectives is to dismantle these walled gardens and promote messaging interoperability. The DMA seeks to break down barriers and ensure that users have more freedom to engage with different platforms and services, while also enabling interoperability between messaging services.
Meta (of WhatsApp and Facebook fame) is designated as a “gatekeeper” under the DMA. This means that Meta holds a dominant position in the market, controlling key access points that can potentially limit competition or consumer choice. The act outlines various obligations that Meta must comply with to ensure a fairer and more open digital environment.
The XMPP Standards Foundation is now publishing an Open Letter to Meta, to advocate for the adoption of XMPP for messaging interoperability. It argues that Meta’s proposal falls short: Meta’s current approach to interoperability, which relies on restrictive NDAs, proprietary APIs, and centralized control, is not true interoperability.
The XSF argues that Meta should adopt XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol), a proven, open standard that allows for true federation, decentralization, enhanced privacy, and scalability. XMPP enables seamless communication between different services, akin to email or phone networks. Meta has previously utilized XMPP for WhatsApp and Messenger and has embraced federation for other services, showing that adoption and implementation are not only achievable, but has already been proven to work.
The XSF urges Meta to adopt XMPP for messaging interoperability to comply with the DMA and build a competitive, open messaging ecosystem. The XSF is ready to collaborate and evolve the protocol as needed.
The Ignite Realtime community is based on the strength and flexibility offered by XMPP. Projects like Openfire, Smack, Pade and Spark are direct implementations of the XMPP protocol. We have firsthand witnessed the flexibility, reliability and maturity of the protocol, and have been successfully applying it for years, if not decades. We should therefore fully endorse the XSF’s call to action!
It is time for real interoperability. Let’s make it happen!
You can find the Open Letter of the XSF here: XMPP | Open Letter to Meta: Support True Messaging Interoperability with XMPP
A accompanying technical briefing is also published: XMPP | Detailed technical briefing: The Case for XMPP – Why Meta Must Embrace True Messaging Interoperability
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The XMPP Standards Foundation’s yearly Summit will be held on January 30 and 31st, in Brussels. The Summit is an annual two-day gathering where we discuss XMPP protocol development topics. It is a place for XMPP developers to meet each other, and make progress on current issues within the protocol and ecosystem.
Immediately following the Summit is FOSDEM. FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
I will be present at the Summit, and a small army of Ignite community members (including myself) will be present at FOSDEM We hope to see you at either event! If you’re around, come say hi!
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In an annual vote, not one, not two, but three Ignite Realtime community members have been selected into leadership positions of the XMPP Standards Foundation! 
The XMPP Standards Foundation is an independent, nonprofit standards development organisation whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Most of the projects that we’re maintaining in the Ignite Realtime community have a strong dependency on XMPP.
The XSF Board of Directors, in which both @Flow and @dwd are elected, oversees the business affairs of the organisation. They are now in a position to make key decisions on the direction of XMPP technology and standards development, manage resources and partnerships to further the growth of the XMPP ecosystem and promote XMPP in the larger open-source and communications community, advocating for its adoption and use in various applications.
The XMPP Council, in which @danc has been reelected, is the technical steering group that approves XMPP Extension Protocols. The Council is responsible for standards development and process management. With that, Dan is now on the forefront of new developments within the XMPP community!
Congrats to you all, Dan, Dave and Florian!
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Today, we’ve released a new version of the Threaddump plugin for Openfire: version 1.2.0.
The Threaddump plugin is a handy plugin to collect diagnostics, useful for drilling down into the inner workings of Openfire. It can be of great value for developers, but is of little use to others.
In this new release, compatibility with Openfire versions 4.8.0 and later has been restored! To do so, some functionality was sacrificed: the plugin will no longer offer the possibility to automatically generate thread dumps when core thread pools reach a certain level of activity.
As always, your instance of Openfire should automatically make available to update in the next few hours. Alternatively, you can download the new release of the plugin at the Threaddump plugin’s archive page.
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