Actually Openfire is a messaging server. Openfire (previously known as Wildfire, and Jive Messenger) is an XMPP server written in Java. I was reviewing this today in preparation for a potential project and was very pleasently surprise to find it bundled as a virtual appliance by Jumpbox. I’ve mentioned Jumpbox before as a provided of prepacked and supported virtual appliances with a common admin mechanism. You will find them here.
The thing I find most useful about them is that when I need to take a look at an appliance for prospects like this – I can check if Jumpbox have them – download and test them and then if adopted the client can purchase the production version of the appliance to give them the support and updates they require. I can then delete the obsolete pilot instance and move on to the next project.
In this particular case I wanted a quick look at the Openfire server and was pleased to find that Jumpbox had integrated the webspark client into the install meaning I could within five minutes have a chat going without any client installs on machines !!
For reference Openfire supports the following features:
- Web-based administration panel
- Plugin interface
- Customizable
- SSL/TLS support (although not with self-signed certificates)
- User-friendly web interface and guided installation
- Database connectivity (i.e. embedded Apache Derby or other DBMS with JDBC 3 driver) for storing messages and user details
- LDAP connectivity
- Platform independent, pure Java
- Full integration with Spark