Dear OpenWengo Community,
It's been a long time since I wanted to post a regular OpenWengo Weekly
News. Unfortunately, we were so busy that it wasn't possible until
today. Don't worry, we'll probably be even more busy in the future, but
having posted this one weekly news today will encourage me and the
OpenWengo community to post again, hopefully on a weekly basis ;-). This
"Weekly News" covers more than the past week, but anyway, things will
get more conventional next time.
The past days have been pretty interesting because many things came to a
state where they are near completion, or already available as
pre-release versions for everyone try out.
OpenWengo Firefox extension
Hurray, It's official now, the first version of the /WengoPhone Firefox
extension/ Beta is out! It's already sitting in my Firefox sidebar and I
must say I love it!
It will soon be available from our subversion repository and as an
installable XPI file. In the meantime, you can check our Wiki, we added
a WengoPhone Firefox extension section that describes the whole thing
here:
http://dev.openwengo.com/trac/openwengo/trac.cgi/wiki/WengoPhoneFirefoxExtension.
While it's already very handy to have WengoPhone available anytime, it
opens up a lot of possibilities in the future : integration into
Thunderbird or Calendar or use as a standalone application with
XULRunner, etc.
It means a lot for users, but also for developers and contributors. The
Mozilla XPFE (for Cross Platform Front End) is indeed very fun to hack
on, and I hope the OpenWengo Community will find great ways to have fun
with it.
New OpenWengo Web site
Hurray again! We've tried hard to show our commitment to
Free/Open-Source Software and an open community in the past.
Unfortunately, the current OpenWengo web site does not convey this
commitment very well, so we have been working on a remake. In our
opinion, the new version is much much better at expressing our core
values, and we are all very proud of it. Also, the whole website
validates as XHTML, so you'll be able to view it with any browser,
including text-only (lynx, anyone?). There is some pretty advanced CSS
too, so it looks cool on graphic-capable browsers thanks to a
custom-crafted design by Julien De Luca.
Adrien Cahen (aka Gaarf on IRC) has put a lot of work into it, and we
hope you'll like it as much as we do.
OpenWengo Enhancement Proposals (OWEPs)
A new section has appeared in the Wiki. Its name is "OpenWengo
Enhancement Proposals" and it can be found here :
http://dev.openwengo.com/trac/openwengo/trac.cgi/wiki/OpenWengoEnhancementProposals.
It is very likely that you'll find many similarities between OWEPs and
other such initiatives that took place in FOSS projects like Python with
PEPs or Jabber with JEPs. The goal of OWEPs is to allow the community to
work on new functionalities or enhancements of existing ones without the
need for their work to be tightly coupled with the core team.
The result of such proposals should be patches to a specific branch of
WengoPhone NG or WengoPhone Firefox extension, and should be documented
on a wiki page of their own.
We hope that OWEPs will greatly lower the barrier to start contributing
and having fun in the OpenWengo community, while maintaining a high
level of quality for contributions.
Sander Tuit (aVirulence on #openwengo) has been very active in setting
up this section, and I welcome him as a new editor of
our Trac's Wiki. Thanks Sander!
Subversion repository maintainance
NG's source code was located at
https://dev.openwengo.com/svn/openwengo/trunk . It is now available at
https://dev.openwengo.com/svn/openwengo/wengophone-ng/trunk . There are
now directories for branches and tags, which means that we'll be able to
follow a more conventional development process, with branches and tags
created when appropriate.
You'll probably need to delete your working copy (don't forget to store
the changes you made to your working copy before using svn diff!) and
checkout the whole thing again. Wiki documentation has been updated
accordingly.
NG's chat support near completion
A lot of work has been done regarding chat and presence support lately.
Commits from "pbernery" in the Trac's timeline during the past week will
show you more detais about this. It has even been used to implement chat
support in the next release of the Firefox extension (you can see a
screenshot here:
http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2006/01/26/1533-chat-in-wengo-for-firefox).
The new chat framework has been engineered with multiple protocols in
mind, and we hope it should let us add many protocols easily.
Contributions
Several nice contributions have been done so far, and we're very proud
welcome the work of talented contributors.
Patrick Aljord has proposed an enhancement for the AboutWindow and an
implementation for the NG's WebBrowser utility class. There is still
some work to do. You can track these enhancements with tickets #321 and
#322 respectively.
He also extracted useful UML class diagrams from the source code (one
for each of the PAC design pattern layer). The information regarding
these diagrams are available here :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.wengophone.devel/753. IMHO,
these diagrams should be enhanced and completed and could become pretty
useful for everyone. I've personnally begun to work on this, but i have
not found a usable UML diagrams designer so far that is freely available
for everyone. Does anyone know about such a solution?
Jean-Philippe Barrette, maintainer of the SFLPhone project
(http://www.sflphone.org/), has also kindly suggested that we enhance
the API that we expose to our libraries' clients. He created a patch
that illustrates what he suggests for UNIX platforms only. This
enhancement can be tracked with ticket #327.
Jean-Philippe also suggested that we share our work regarding the skin
library which would allow us to have a completely customizable GUI. It
is, of course, a very sound idea and we hope to work together with the
SFLPhone project in the future on this and other things.
We came across the amd64 problem once again, and this issue should be
fixed very soon if we don't want to let many users without anything
functional. "Misc" (his IRC Nickname), a Mandriva contributor, andPhilip
S. Hempel kindly donated a shell on one of their amd64 box. Many thanks
to both!
Claudio Erba suggested that WengoPhone NG could be used as a white board
client in the future, which makes a lot of sense in the perspective of
richer communications. He kindly shared the work he has done before on
such a client. It includes nice screen shots of what his project's UI
looked like before its development was canceled. Screen shots and more
information are available here :
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.wengophone.devel/720.
Helmut Pozimski has kindly contributed WengoPhone Classic Debian Sarge
packages :
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.wengophone.devel/710. It
currently works only on X86 architectures, because of the amd64 issue we
mentioned above. However, it should be very handy for all Debian users
out there before we setup our automated build system.
Going on with packages, Martin Raoul has kindly donated SUSE 10.0 RPM
packages. He used Alien to convert the Debian package, which puts the
light on the fact that we still don't have any source and binary tarball
package. We've created tickets #332 and #333 to track this issue. Feel
free to have fun hacking on this, any effort will be very much appreciated.
A lot of questions have been raised regarding the WinCE port too, and
enthusiasts have shown their motivation to work on this embedded system.
This thread sums up the situation regarding the PocketPC port :
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.wengophone.devel/696.
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.wengophone.devel/696>Mathieu
Stute has worked on the MinGW support for NG lately, and it built
blissfully at the beginning of the week. It should still be ok, and it
is unlikely to break but feel free to test it and report any bug you may
find.
Adrien Pestel has also started to fix various places in the code and the
build process so that WengoPhone NG is able to build with Visual Studio
2005. It is almost finished now.
The good news is that the Free edition of VS 2005 seems to have many
features, and it is very likely that Windows developers will be able to
freely use a Visual Studio environment to build NG. If you feel like
you'd want to help him on this task, please drop him a line on the
wengophone-devel mailing list.
Many others have kindly suggested ideas and provided feedback on the
wengophone-devel mailing list or on IRC. I apologize if i forgot someone
in the list of contributions above, and i thank you all for your enthusiasm.
Conclusion
It's been a busier and funnier week than the one before, and the next
one will probably beat it. We welcomed new contributors and active
users, and the Firefox extension creates many new opportunities to have fun.
We hope to have our new community web site really soon (it's a matter of
days now, hopefully). We'll also work on libGaim integration in the next
few weeks, and WengoPhone NG will have evolved a lot by that time. Next
week, we'll also work on porting the Firefox extension to GNU/Linux,
MacOS X and to any other operating system our users will use.
As usual, we hope to share a lot of ideas, code and thoughts with the
OpenWengo community, and we're glad to be part of it.
All the best,
--
Julien Gilli
OpenWengo, the free and multiplatform VoIP client
http://dev.openwengo.com/
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