[Telepathy] Suitability of Telepathy for Pontarius on Windows and Mac OS X

[Sjoerd Simons]

On Sat, 2010-11-27 at 15:49 +0100, Jon Kristensen wrote:
> Hello Telepathy people!
> 
> I have started working on Pontarius 0.1, a set of free software media 
> server programs. [1]Pontarius will build services on top of the 
> [2]Extended Personal Media Network (XPMN) architecture, as defined by 
> Dirk Meyer. We will have a server program that will transfer resources 
> end-to-end encrypted over XMPP. I also want some kind of client that can 
> access these resources at the request of other applications.
> 
> Telepathy seems like a wonderful library for GNU/Linux, but do you think 
> it will be a good choice for the Windows or Mac OS X platforms? It would 
> be great if the media accessor client could be /interoperable/ in that I 
> can use the same client code across all platforms. I'm considering 
> developing the application with Python, but I may fall back to C if that 
> is more reasonable.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any comments! :)

Sounds like a quite cool project and well suited to what Telepathy
provides. We currently don't have the ability to do end-to-end
encryption, but have been doing some research work on it. Cosimo Cecchi
did an initial proof of concept as part of his Masters thesis using
XTLS. I'd love it for someone to pick that up and push it forward (so we
can use it not just for your project, but also for general
client-to-client text chat)

Telepathy (and specifically the XMPP backend) is portable to Windows and
Mac, ofcourse on modern Linux system you have the advantage that there
is already infrastructure available. E.g. Empathy is available for
account setup and presence management on the gnome desktop. For Mac and
Windows this kind of infrastructure isn't in place, although porting
Empathy to those platforms would be interesting.

As the development language, python is fine for the client side.
Although tp-glib is getting a lot of nice convenience API, while
telepathy-python isn't really pushed forward at the moment. Our plan is
to make sure gobject-introspection work very well with telepathy-glib,
so you could use that from python. But you'lll probably hit issues with
that at this point (obviously help in this area is very welcome). 

For some of the more advanced features in XMPP (e.g. E2E encryption and
plugging in the media storage XEPs), you'll need to improve Gabble
itself, the language of choice there would be C. E2E encryption should
go into the core of it, for the media specific stuff a plugin might be
better suited.

All in all, lots of bits and pieces. But an interesting project as a
whole. For more specific questions, feel free to join us on #telepathy
and ask away ;) (Or on this list if you prefer ofcourse)


-- 
Sjoerd Simons <sjoerd.simons at collabora.co.uk>
Collabora Ltd.