Sunday, September 16, 2012

Forking ejabberd

This weekend I decided to start playing with a fork of ejabberd.  I have already started refactoring things in preparation for adding dynamic vhost creation and removal.  I'm calling it Fork21 and I already have a new website devoted to it.

All of this comes after building Chatmongers with ejabberd 3 which has resulted in me having a number of misgivings about ejabberd 3.  It looked like it should be coming out soon when we first evaluated it in the summer of 2011.  15 months later I'm not sure if it will ever ship and the current alpha release has some problematic breakage.  In the name of getting a better chat system for chatmongers the dynamic vhost management features need to be implemented in ejabberd 2.1.x.

I may run out of time before I can finish this so I don't want to make too many promises so for now Fork21 is an interesting project for me to fix whatever I don't like about the current ejabberd.  If the problems with ejabberd 3 can't be resolved then chatmongers as a service may not be viable long term.

For the moment I'm working on Fork21 for my own enjoyment.  If I produce something useful that others like or that is useful to fixing Chatmongers then that just means I'm not alone in wanting what I'm trying to turn ejabberd into.  If nobody cares then I had some fun hacking on an interesting piece of software.