[maemo-developers] [canola-devel] [GSoC 09] IM Client for Canola - report 1

[From: Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 2:16 AM, Thiago Bolaum <bolaum at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
> This is the first report for my GSoC project. So I'll talk about the initial
> steps for it done last week.
> As told by my mentor, antognolli, some people at #maemo and #canola
> suggested the idea of using Telepathy instead of python-purple as the IM lib
> of the plugin, as it will be a standard for most Maemo's projects dealing
> with communication. We have decided to think about it.
> So my mission was understanding both libraries and trying to use them. Both
> have very comprehensive examples, that make use of almost everything needed
> in the plugin, such as connecting, sending and receiving messages. File
> transfer wasn't tested.
> I'll describe in more detail my conclusions on each of these libs:
>
> Telepathy:
>   . Built to be a generic communications framework using D-Bus.
>   . Has Python bindings to facilitate the use of D-Bus, using conection
> managers.
>   . Can be used with EFL D-Bus MainLoop (used inside Canola).
>   . Has a connection manager called telepathy-haze that exposes libpurple's
> protocols to Telepathy framework.
>   . A bit more burocratic access than python-purple, since it isn't a direct
> binding.
>   . These connection managers (gabble (jabber), butterfly (MSN), haze
> (libpurple), salut (Bonjour)) seem pretty stable.
>
> python-purple:
>   . Easy to use and less burocratic, since it is a direct binding (written
> in cython) to libpurple.
>   . Already implements all basic signals, enough to develop the IM plugin,
> or at least a version with basic functionalities.
>   . Active and accessible developers, to help improving the lib.
>   . Needs testing and some bugs correction (I was able to fix an annoying
> one, concerning the necessity of LD_PRELOADing libpurple).
>   . Using this would lead to a more stable and usable version of
> python-purple, but less time would be spent developing the plugin itself.
>
> As said before, I think that both could handle the job, having their own
> pros and cons. So we wanted some feedback from you guys, which do you think
> is better and why. After that, I'll talk to antognolli and we will have a
> final decision on which we'll work with.
> Meanwhile, I intend to start working with the interface, in a top-down
> approach, so instead of drawing mockups, everyone would be able to interact
> with the plugin and suggest changes.
>
> That's all for now. Thank you and good work for everyone!

Telepathy is much better in theory than practice, but given Nokia
resources for a while now, it is becoming better and better. First
versions of it on 770 were really unusable and Pidgin usage grown a
lot.

There is a huge problem with both libpurple and telepathy that is good
support for most protocols. MSN sucks in both, amsn being the solution
for that. This is mostly because IM networks are similar but not
equal, and trying to fit all their specific bits into a single
protocol is hard.  However, it's unlikely that Canola will do more
than basic message viewing and minimal input/send, so we can ignore
such problems for now.

But yes, let's believe it will be good enough and provide what we
need, let's go Telepathy.



-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
--------------------------------------
MSN: barbieri at gmail.com
Skype: gsbarbieri
Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202