SFLPhone-KDE is now Ring-KDE and is moving to kdereview

[Emmanuel Lepage]

Hello world,

The SFLPhone team is proud to announce the project is now called Ring ahead of
our 2.0 release. We are expanding the scope of the project from being a SIP
telephony client to being a full SIP client and a P2P secure communication
application based on open standards.

The KDE client used to be one client among other (GTK, KDE, Ubuntu mobile*,
Plasma* and Android*), but, as our feature set grew, this created a lot of
duplicated efforts. Features such contact handling and information sources
gathering had to be done in each client. From now on, all client will be
rewritten on top of the old SFLPhone-KDE client library (now called
libringclient). This library is a pure Qt4/Qt5 library that turn the low level
Ring daemon communication API into an high level client API. It depend on
QtCore and optionally QtDbus. Information sources, such as contact are handled
by extensions injected into the library at runtime (this is how we currently
bind to Akonadi). The new native GTK and OSX client already use it as a backend.
Using Qt model and QObject along with GTK Model and GObject work surprisingly
well with Qt5! My college Stepan only took a couple of days to write an abstract
glue layer between GTK and Qt and now it just work (models, variants, event loop
and connect()/signals)!

The first step toward our 2.0 release is to split the libringclient project from
the sflphone-kde one. This has just been done and the project can be downloaded
at:

https://projects.kde.org/projects/kdereview/libringclient/repository

For now, it is in kdereview. I would like to move this to extragear as soon as
possible. I cleaned the code to fix most EBN warnings and I am currently
updating the Doxygen / API doc. The API is not frozen yet, but we are getting
there. The documentation is still quite weak, but is getting better fast.

So here I am:

* In the last run Krazy ran mostly without issue, I will see how it goes now
that it is a separate repository. (it still has to run in the new repository
as I am writing this)
* The documentation coverage is about 70% and getting up fast
* I profiled the library extensively over the years, while there is always
room for improvements, I am satisfied. It can handle tens of thousand of
contacts and calls on a <2Ghz computer and work fine on ARM.
* Translations are working
* The code is C++11, but still support Qt4, so it doesn't use all features
* There is some external documentation in this wiki page in the Ring
project common wiki:

https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/sflphone/wiki/KDE_coding_guidelines
https://projects.savoirfairelinux.com/projects/sflphone/wiki/Libringclient

The immediate future:

* Get feedback to be moved into extragear/network, fix what has to be fixed
* Do the same with the other half of the project, the Ring-KDE client

Thanks for taking a look!

Best regards,
Emmanuel Lepage

* Never officially part of stable releases