I’m proud to announce that the Kopete Telepathy (testbed) plugin is now usable for a text conversation.

Now the obvious screenshot:

As you can see, Kopete KDE4 chat window is a bit broken. You can’t see what you are typing, nice accessibility feature isn’t it I used telepathy-gabble connection manager with my local Jabber server for the tests.

Some people may wonder what Telepathy is all about. Telepathy is a D-BUS interface specification managed by Freedesktop.org and mostly developed by Collabora Limited. It allow a program to communicate via D-BUS to a connection manager that support a defined set of protocols. This is similar to a local client/server architecture for IM, Voice and Video over IP on the desktop.

For developing the Telepathy plugin, I used Tapioca libraries. Tapioca is a set of convience libraries that implement Telepathy specification. Currently, it have bindings for C#, Glib and Qt. Obviously I used Qt bindings developed maintly by INdT folks.

Some may wonder why I’m doing this plugin. During the Akademy 2006 conference, the Kopete team discussed with members of Telepathy and Decibel projects. The result from these discussions was the plan for the future of IM in KDE desktop. We decided to go the Telepathy/Tapioca/Decibel way for managing our protocols. Before migrating to full Telepathy, we decided to make us familiar with Telepathy work and create a proof-of-concept plugin.

Decibel is the KDE integration of real-time communication. Decibel will come with Houston, a daemon which will manage preferences and connection managers. Tobias Hunger is busy working on Houston daemon and D-BUS interface in KDE svn. Currently Kopete doesn’t use Decibel.

Time will tell when Kopete will begin migrate to Telepathy and Decibel. Some feature are still missing in related projects so I can’t guarantee that Kopete 1.0(coming with KDE 4.0) will come with native Telepathy support. If not, it will ship with the Telepathy plugin

Also I would like to thanks Telepathy and Tapioca people for their quick response to my bug reports, patches and questions.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.