Apr 10, 2009
What Exactly Is Openfire?
Slashdot has recently had a few posts involving Openfire and I just have one question: what the heck is Openfire, exactly? The Openfire website doesn’t tell us anything other than it “is a real time collaboration (RTC) server”. In the Openfire Support forum, somebody asks this question point-blank and the only useful answers tell the person that they don’t need Openfire. Can anybody shed any light on this? Is it just an instant messaging/chat server? Does it burn coal or use nuclear energy? Will your attractiveness to the opposite sex increase exponentially? Come on, how hard can it be to have a Features page?
This isn’t so much about Openfire specifically, but just poor website representation of a product. This actually happens more often than I find believable.
It’s an XMPP (Jabber) server at heart, though I believe they whacked a lot of extra cruft in there. I mostly see it being used as a straight XMPP thing.
Well, that *is* what it says on the front page: XMPP/Jabber server. Still doesn’t quite describe how it’s different from any other Jabber server, other than implying other Jabber servers aren’t real-time. Google Wave is also a real-time collaboration server built on an XMPP core but it’s pretty obvious that it’s more than just that and they do a good job of showing us. Openfire could very well be exactly the same thing but they don’t tell us more.