Making JWChat work with OpenFire

Getting JWChat to work with OpenFire is difficult without some customization. Here’s a step-by-step guide to how I got it working with Apache running on Linux:

  1. Make sure Apache is running - The computer I was using had Apache 2 installed but Apache 1 configuration files, preventing Apache from starting. Since I didn’t have any site data to lose, copying the default Apache 2 configuration file worked fine.
  2. Make sure OpenFire is running - This seems pretty obvious since you need a Jabber server to connect to.
  3. Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf - If you don’t have a <VirtualHost> section for your site, you’ll have to make one; <VirtualHost *> works just fine for a single site server. The following JWChat configuration lines need to be added inside the <VirtualHost> block that you’ll be setting JWChat up in: <Directory /var/www/html> Option +Multiviews </Directory> AddDefaultChatset UTF-8 ProxyPass /http-bind/ http://127.0.0.1:8080/http-bind/
  4. Extract JWChat - Download JWChat from the project site and extract it into your website directory. I moved the files to /var/www/html/, but you may want to place it elsewhere, so update any paths to match your set-up.
  5. Edit /var/www/html/config.js - JWChat needs to be configured to connect to your OpenFire server. Make the following changes:
    1. Change SITENAME to reflect the server name that OpenFire is configured to host for.
    2. Comment out the existing backends in BACKENDS and add your own. You can provide your own name and description, but these must be same:
      • httpbase:"http-bind/"
      • type:"binding"
      • servers_allowed:[SITENAME]
  6. Edit OpenFire properties - Log into OpenFire as an administrator and add two server properties:
    • xmpp.httpbind.client.requests.polling = 0
    • xmpp.httpbind.client.requests.wait = 10
    These are required because of a bug where JWChat won’t respect the polling values given to it by the server.
  7. Restart Apache - Run apachectl graceful to restart Apache gracefully and load the new configuration.

At this point, when you visit your site, you should see a JWChat login screen. The username is without the @domain suffix.

3 Comments

  1. Pythoneer » Make jwchat and openFire work said,

    April 22, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    [...] to this blog post I got it running, though I was not less than five hours hunting. Gee, I wish there was a tool which [...]
  2. 全力以赴 » Blog 存档 » 在openfire基础上安装jwchat said,

    August 15, 2007 at 3:19 am

    [...] 参考了http://chromus.kajigger.com/blog/index.php?p=100,但实际上没有必要和较劲, 开始的失败就是配置总不对。 [...]
  3. a little bit of zeank » Blog Archive » JWChat and OpenFire said,

    August 28, 2007 at 9:02 am

    [...] good tutorial on Making JWChat work with OpenFire. Thanks for [...]

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