Up North

I haven’t blogged much about the development I’m doing on Loudmouth. I started hacking Loudmouth some three-four years ago to for the fun of implementing Jabber (before it was turned into a standard named XMPP).

While Loudmouth sure served it’s purpose it has been getting more and more complex to extend, I’ve also kept the API stable on the 1.X branch. In order to make the design fit better with the current needs I’ve chosen to break the API for Loudmouth 2 and do quite a large redesign. One big change for users of Loudmouth is that I have decided to make certain derivable objects use GObject.

In Loudmouth 2, it will be much easier to extend the library with application specific extension, for example make Loudmouth use a Unix socket transport layer for using XMPP for IPC or add an extension to implement a certain XEP (XMPP Extension Proposal).

Loudmouth will also be split into Loudmouth Core and Loudmouth Extended (two separate libraries within the same source tarball). Where Loudmouth Core will give approximately the same functionality and API level as Loudmouth 1 and Loudmouth Extended will be a higher level API.

I hope to be able to post some documents on the new design up on Imendio Developer Pages soon.

Took the plunge today and migrated imendio.com jabber server from Jabberd2 to Wildfire. Due to Wildfires import plugin it was pretty little job to migrate the accounts and rosters. However the plugin doesn’t support importing vCard or offline messages.

I found a script by Daniel Henninger that migrated from Jabberd2 to Jabberd1. Hacked it a bit and ended up with a script that generates the XML needed for the plugin:

You can get it here (not supported, beautified or otherwise recommended if you care for your brains): j2toWildfire.pl.

Let me know if you notice any problems communicating with me or one of the other imendians.

Like I guess no one missed Google released GTalk earlier this year. This caused quite a lot of noise, especially in the Jabber/XMPP community since they selected XMPP as protocol for this. It also lets you connect to GTalk with any available Jabber client, Jabber clients exists on a diversity of platforms.

One big obstacle for Jabber/XMPP is that it’s userbase consists of a minority of IM users compared to the other networks, like AIM. Yesterday it was announced that Google buys 5% of AOL (who are responsible for AIM) and that they will integrate their IM systems.

For a project such as GNOME, going with XMPP is the only viable option in my opinion. A project that claims to support and chose free and open standards shouldn’t block a pure Jabber/XMPP client to be the IM-client of choice. A few years back when discussions about including Gossip in GNOME, the main argument against it was that it didn’t support AIM (and to some extent MSN and ICQ).

If Google can choose XMPP for IM, shouldn’t GNOME be able to?