Hey there, Unfortunately the licq domain still seems to be down, so I cannot reach the blog and check whether my ideas are already on there. But I would like to share some thoughts I bare in mind since a while:
Unlike many other, totally monolithic, clients, licq has a nice
structure which divides into a frontend, doing most of the business
stuff, and several frontend plugins. This makes licq a candidate for
almost anybody. I am using the console plugin and the kde-qt plugin,
depending on whether I am at home or my access is limited to a ssh
connection.
(In addition to this structure, I like the way contact and history data
is stored in easy readable text files rather than complicated file
databases or something alike. This allows to do some further
computations like statistics and so on.)
Well, my thought: In addition to the idea of frontend plugins, why don't
we make this perfect by decoupling frontend and backend at all? We
already got a pipe between both of them and, in theory, frontend and
backend are independent from each other. All necessary is to make the
frontend plugins runnable on their own and use a TCP socket instead of a
named pipe.
What would be the benefit? In my network configuration, I have a
communication server, handling issues like e-mail, telephone and, in
theory, icq. I do not need to go offline if I reboot my workstation or
shut it down at night. And I don't have scattered contact lists and
histories since all data is stored on one server. But, too, I can only
use the console plugin via screen. (X-Forwarding would work as well, but
I could not detach, which makes this solution useless.)
So with decoupled backend and frontends, I could run my backend as a
kind of icq service (maybe even for other programms like calendar
notification?) and start any frontend if I want to use my icq from anywhere.
An ad-hoc solution to test the idea could be a spectial frontend plugin
which acts as a backend server and some backend which receives data and
passes it to the real frontend. But before starting something like this,
I would like to hear what you think about the idea at all.
Would it be useful for anybody else but me? Did I miss something in my
idea? Or, maybe, is there a solution I haven't found yet?
Anyway, licq is the best messaging tool I have used in the past six
years. :)
Stefan
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