NFC Chat / News: Recent posts

A completely new lightweight client has been added in this version. We're also introducing a persistence package, wich allows you to permanently store ignore lists and room op and access privilidges. Also new is the ability to kick users out of rooms or off the server for a given amount of time. Lastly, a number of bugs have been fixed.

This is a release candidate for version 1.1.0. If you encounter any bugs in this release, or anything else that has slipped our attention, please send a bug report or post to the forums. We expect to release the final version 1.1.0 in a week or two.

This first release of NFC chat in 9 months fixes some bugs that we encountered lately, mostly reported in the forums. The bugs were mostly related to logging and incorrect startup scripts.

By popular demand the functionality of the JdbcAuthenticator (which controls authentication of users using a database) has been enhanced. You can now restrict all access to the chat server to only the users in the database, and you can encrypt passwords in the database. The use of the JdbcAuthenticator is documented in 'database authentication.html' in the docs directory.

It's been over 2 years since the last release of NFC. Somewhat to my
suprise people still mail me about it and seem to be using it. A few
have even dared to get under the hood and add their own hacks to the
source code.

I thought that I owed it to whoever is using this or trying to use it
to make a maintanence release. Up to version 1.0.6-rc2, it used to be
pretty hard to get this all to build and run, especially the
http-tunneling support. I think the build and deploy process is now
quite easier than it used to be, thanks to switching the build system
to use Ant from Make. [I could go into a long rant right here about
how great Ant is for Java projects, but I'll spare you]... read more

This releases fixes numerous bugs and introduces a (very basic) Swing GUI. See the download section for the ChangeLog and files.

The FAQ-O-Matic is now up and running at http://research.lyrisoft.com/cgi-bin/fom. Not much there now, but I expect it to grow based on questions that people ask.

We are now distributed and scalable. Look out.

Sun's JMS (Java Message Service) specification is going to be used to transform NFC into a scalable distributed chat system. Details about JMS are at http://java.sun.com/products/jms/. More details about NFC's usage of JMS are forthcoming.

Here is a nice new SourceForge project for NFC.