[Decibel] Status of decibel

[Tobias Hunger]

Dear Mailing Listers...

thanks for this surpringly large interest in Decibel!

I think a short introduction is in order...

My name is Tobias Hunger and I work for basyskom.de in Darmstadt, Germany. My 
company wants to develop Decibel, a real time communication framework for KDE 
build on the telepathy spec and entrusted this job to Stefan Eilers. 
Unfortunately (or luckily for me;-) he has to concentrate on different 
projects nowadays, so he passed on the staff to me. I am pretty competent 
with C++ and have a good working knowledge of Qt4 and have worked on some 
open source projects. So far I did have little exposure to the KDE people... 
and it seems I am seriously lacking in communication skills (considering all 
the emails I got since I left the office on friday;-). I will try to work on 
improving this. 

OK, so far so good.

The Vision:
-------------

Let's start here... this part is way more interessting than what we got to 
show so far:-|

Telepathy is a pretty nice spec, dealing with low level aspects of real time 
communications. It handles setting up connections to communication servers, 
etc. The telepathy people have the idea of adding a layer called "Mission 
Control" on top of that to interface with the user. The best description of 
what this MC wants to do is here: 
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Mission_Control:
Mission Control seems to be implemented in parts in an application called 
"cohoba" nowadays by the way.

What Decibel wants to provide something similar for KDE. We want to realize 
that in an desktop independent layer called Houston (which nowdays is a 
component of cohoba by the way) and an KDE spezific layer.

In our current plans Houston should allow desktop applications to use 
"Accounts" to connect to "Protocols". This framework can be used to connect 
the desktop specific "Handlers" to in and outgoing channels of information.

It should
 * store account information in one central place
 * store and handle account "configuration" (online/offline, visibility, etc.)
 * store preferences (like which one of telepathy's connection managers to use
     for which protocol, etc.)
 * Act on this information by bringing up/down the correct connection
     managers.

 * Initialize connections to contacts by activating accounts that can reach a
     contact.

 * Listen for incomming connections, patching them through to the prefered
     handler for that kind of channel

One special handler we want to implement on top of this framework is supposed 
to connect the presence informations of the networks a user is online in to 
the addressbook as stored in akonadi. 

Status of Decibel:
---------------------

So far we have little code, mostly stuff to experiment with the telepathy 
spec, tapioca and of course DBus, nothing worth showing to the world:-)

Building Qt4 bindings for the telepathy spec proofed to be surprisingly hard 
since dbusxml2cpp fails on most of the telepathy XML files. Today I saw some 
updates in qt-copy in SVN and maybe those fix those issues.

Other projects:
------------------

There si of course telepathy, which defines the spec that everything is based 
upon. Tapioca is another project which started out with similar goals to 
telepathy and is nowadays implementing the same specification.

Both are not in perfect working order yet, both have no Qt4 bindings.

Stefan decided to base Decibel on tapioca, mostly for soft factors. It is 
easier to communicate our ideas to the tapioca developers than to the people 
behind telepathy. I would like to stick with this decision. Since both 
projects implement the same spec this should not matter too much at this 
point in time.

OK, this must be enough for now, got to catch my train:-)

-- 

Tobias Hunger
Entwickler

basysKom GmbH
Robert-Bosch-Str. 7 | 64293 Darmstadt | Germany
Tel: +49 6151 3968769 | Fax: -736 |
tobias.hunger at basyskom.de | www.basyskom.de