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I'm David Graham, a software designer in Denver, Colorado. I work at GitHub, making github.com a little more wonderful every day. Follow me on Twitter!

Vines XMPP Server, Now With Clustering!

We’re proud to announce the fourth preview release of the Vines XMPP server! In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, there are three important new features in this release.

Two Servers Are Better Than One

Thanks to EventMachine, a single Vines chat server can handle plenty of traffic. But eventually, we’ll need a second server (or more) to handle higher loads and provide high-availability should one server fail. In this release, several Vines servers can cluster together, using Redis to route messages among themselves.

I’ll write more in-depth about how the clustering feature works in the future. For now, it’s easy to get started by adding this snippet to your config file.

cluster do
  host 'redis.wonderland.lit'
  port 6379
end

Point two or more Vines servers to the same Redis database and you’re done!

Publish/Subscribe

The XMPP standard includes an extension to support the Publish/Subscribe (a.k.a pubsub) design pattern. This pattern allows connected users to publish messages to a channel without necessarily knowing who’s subscribed to that channel.

This feature is big because Vines can now support more than just instant-messaging applications. Publish/Subscribe is the basis of a new service we’re about to launch into beta. Stay tuned for more on that in the near future!

MongoDB

And finally, user accounts can now be stored in MongoDB databases. Vines can connect to a single MongoDB instance or to a replica set for high-availability.

So Vines can store information in pretty much any database out of the box: simple YAML files, SQL databases, Redis, CouchDB, and MongoDB. And it still has an easy to customize storage API in case one of these options doesn’t quite fit your environment.

Try It Out!

If this is the first time you’re installing Vines, make sure to follow our Ruby install instructions and then run gem install vines. If you already have Vines installed, just update the Ruby gem with gem update vines to install the new version.

- David Graham
30 Jan 2012