December 11, 2006
Wildfire IM public beta
In my last post I mentioned that we're looking for users to try out our test deployment of the Wildfire IM server. Well, now I'm going to make the details public.
You can point your Jabber client to messenger.case.edu, port 5222 (yeah, it's a nonstandard XMPP port... When this goes to production, it'll be the normal 5222). If you don't have a Jabbber client, you can try Jive's open-source Spark. If for some reason your client can't do TLS, you can do the "old style" SSL encryption on port 5223.
Server-to-Server XMPP is enabled, so you should be able to IM Google Talk and other Jabber users. We've also got the IM gateway plugin enabled, which will allow you to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, and IRC to some extent from your Jabber client.
update: All the connection details in this post are now correct, since the port move happened on Wednesday.
Posted by sdh7 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 08, 2006
Wildfire and Spark IM
We've been doing some testing of Jive Software's open-source Wildfire IM server and Spark IM client. We're pretty impressed with what we've seen so far. It does federated XMPP pretty much right out of the box, and there's a plugin that allows gatewaying to other IM services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.). Now, it currently doesn't have voice chat like Oracle RTC does, but Jive has indicated that a libjingle-based implementation is coming, and support for using Asterisk to implement voice is already out there and integration with Cisco's CallManager 5 may be possible too.
Also, we're looking for people who may want to beta test this - if you're interested, comment here, send me an e-mail, or heck, Meebo Me from the front page of my blog.
I'm also looking at Claros Chat as a kind of web-based IM client. Is there any interest in this? Or perhaps there are other alternatives out there?
Update: Since implementing the new IM system, I've discontinued my MeeboMe widget in favor of Wildfire's Presence plugin and an XMPP URL.
Posted by sdh7 at 11:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 10, 2006
Darwin Calendar Server - Success
So, I managed to get the Darwin Calendar Server up and running.
It's still pretty primitive, but once I got Python 2.4 installed, and followed the QuickStart instructions (once they were posted), I was in business. I had a CalDAV server listening on port 8008 of my laptop. I could connect to it in with my web browser, authenticate as admin, and see .ics files in the directory, but that's the extent of the web access at present. In theory, OSAF's Scooby could potentially be connected to it to provide a Web Calendar, until either one is provided or Leopard Server is used.
I then went looking for clients to connect to it. iCal won't support CalDAV until Leopard comes out, so I went looking for other alternatives. I first tried OSAF's Chandler, but that didn't work so well. I couldn't get the OS X version to run for more than 30 seconds(it was version 0.7a3), let alone connect to the server. I then grabbed Mozilla Sunbird and gave it a try. It's working reasonably well.
There aren't any instructions on tying it into LDAP yet - it's right now only using a single hard-coded "admin" account, so the ability to schedule events with other users is unclear at present. Sunbird greyed out the "invite other users" button, but that may just be normal for all I know.
Posted by sdh7 at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 07, 2006
Darwin Calendar Server(!)
It looks like Apple is open-sourcing the Calendar Server that's going to be in OS X Server 10.5. It implements CalDAV, so you should be able to get to it using a client other than iCal.
I'm grabbing it via Subversion as I type this...turns out a lot of it is written in Python. Interesting...
Posted by sdh7 at 11:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Bedework Calendar
I first looked at Bedework a few months ago, and it seemed pretty primitive to me - just a fancy event calendar. I just looked at it again and it looks like they've made a lot of progress, adding personal calendars with CalDAV access, RSS feeds and other features. It's not quite in a position where we would want to adopt it, I think, since I can't figure out any way to invite people to my meetings, and setting up authentication outside of the built-in database consists of "configure Tomcat to talk to LDAP or CAS".
It also seems a little slow to me, but I am just running the quickstart version with embedded HSQLDB, and it's dumping tons of debugging output on the console, so those two factors may have something to do with that.
Posted by sdh7 at 03:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack