[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Tapioca, Cohoba, Telepathy ... oh my!

[From: Marcio Macedo]

Hi,

Robert has explained the situation very well.

>From the Tapioca side, I can say that we don't want Tapioca as just
another IM/VoIP client on the 770. Instead of that, we aim to provide
convenience libraries on top of  telepathy, providing a better "glue"
between telepathy's connection managers and other applications.

For example, someone could hack maemo mapper to display a contact's
presence and location information. Tapioca can be used to provide such
functionality in an easier way: connect(), get_presence(), etc...
(ok, for this particular case, some hack on telepathy would be needed as well)

Another good example would be a game using chat/Voip resources. The
game programmer does not need to care about connection or protocol
details, he could let Tapioca handle that.

For SIP, we used to have a connection manager, but it still needs a
lot of development in order to fit in the new model, and a lot of
fixes to be used in the 770. Maybe Nokia Research Center people finish
theirs before we fix ours, let's see...


On 10/21/06, Robert McQueen <robert.mcqueen at collabora.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> As the article says, Telepathy was developed from the original idea and
> proof of concept by us (Collabora) in association with Nokia. Tapioca
> started out as a seperate project with its own developers,
> specification, backends and frontends, although we shared a bit of code
> on GStreamer, Farsight & libjingle for the streaming to support Google
> Talk voice calls. I think at the time that the article was written, this
> was still the case.
>
> Thankfully, that situation has now changed, and the duplicated effort
> has stopped already. A few months back we joined forces with the Tapioca
> project to move towards a more complete stack based around the Telepathy
> spec. The Tapioca project is now doing absolutely superb work on client
> libraries for the Telepathy framework, including the C# library which is
> basis for the very cool-looking Landell client which is nearing it's 1st
> Telepathy release.
>
> To answer your more technical questions, Cohoba will probably never show
> up on the 770. There's no need - the 770 already has an excellent set of
> Telepathy clients provided by Nokia! The Chat, Call & Address Book
> applications, control panel applet, status bar & task navigator plugins
> do an excellent job of integrating Telepathy into the device.
>
> Cohoba is just a Python client on top of Telepathy which was written to
> try and let desktop/GNOME users make use of the backend stuff such as
> the XMPP backend, Gabble, and VOIP Engine which are used on the 770. Now
> there are already some more promising projects such as Landell under
> way, and the Gossip (GNOME) and Kopete (KDE) IM clients have also shown
> interest and are experimenting with Telepathy support.
>
> For SIP, watch this space. Nokia have already released an IRC backend
> (telepathy-idle), and the Nokia Research team who work on Sofia-SIP are
> also working on a telepathy-sofia backend which they should be releasing
> soon. If Telepathy is doing its job properly, it should just drop in to
> place and let all of the existing clients speak SIP.
>
> As one of the lead developers of Telepathy, I personally am very happy
> and excited to see this happening. I hate to see the duplication of
> effort and fragmented development too, and the whole idea of Telepathy
> is that the backend and frontend work can be split up and shared out. We
> certainly wouldn't be able to start from scratch and produce the
> polished multi-protocol all-singing and all-dancing IM experience that
> people are looking for without help from people like the Tapioca
> project, and now we're pulling in the same direction we should get there
> sooner too. :)
>
> Regards,
> Rob
>
> Michael Wiktowy wrote:
> > Greetings list,
> >
> > I eagerly anticipate a nice GUI-fied (i.e. not sophia-sip) generic SIP
> > client for use on the 770. I had my hopes up when Tapioca was released for
> > the 770 but was confused that it didn't include SIP support ... even in the
> > Gnome version. Now Tapioca seems somewhat ... adrift.
> >
> > I read in one of the latest linux magazines an article on Telepathy that
> > praises the Nokia for adopting it for the N770 and contributing to the
> > project and mentions several other clients but doesn't mention Tapioca ...
> > nor does the Telepathy website. One that they do mention is Cohoba and
> > looking at the website, it looks a whole lot like it was based on Tapioca.
> >
> > I hate to see all this splintered development essentially doing the same
> > work.
> > So I figured that I would ask on this list since it is likely to contain
> > the
> > people in the know ... is Tapioca abandoned? Is work on-going in Cohoba?
> > Are
> > we going to see Cohoba for the 770? Sometime soon?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > /Mike
>
> _______________________________________________
> maemo-developers mailing list
> maemo-developers at maemo.org
> https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
>