Ali fixed the test framework to better handle asynchronous operations in People backends so the Last.fm contact source got merged into trunk! Last.fm is like the only social network I really enjoy so that was my heart choice to start a People proof of concept backend.

And, just for fun, I just happened to push a complete FriendFeed backend! This is actually a valuable contact source as it brings lots of information about which services your contacts are using.

Backend development for People is a real pleasure. Sure, it gets more complicated dealing with utterly over-complicated formats but when it’s REST based, it’s just quick and easy (each of the upper mentionned backends took me only two hours hacking).

Exciting.

Well, the title is pretty much it.

Since the beginning of the development of People, we continuously validate any new stuff or modifications delivering unit tests, mandatory step before even thinking of proposing the corresponding working branch to merge into trunk.

That process changed the way I develop, really. Before, I used to hack my bunch of code, verify obvious statements with some standard output display and then assume it was OK. Now, I am more focused when writing it, thinking more on how it should be used. Once done, I write the unit test being aware of how it could be used. Being more focused, I save time, reducing the bug probability at this step, I save time, and if I save time, I can hack more, with a better code quality. I work better.

All this moved my “I’m gonna explode what I was working on for days is working Yippee!” scream from compilation success to test running success (however, it’s still often during the night so, sorry neighbors). How naive I used to be.

This happened last night: I just finished hacking something I found quite complicated, so I wrote the unit test, actually without any hope, and the test failed, I fixed a few wrong bits, the test passed, at the second try. I couldn’t believe it. That one deserved a great scream. Thinking back about it, it’s just normal. That code may be complicated but it’s only using already tested components, and well, being focused help when hacking, so, just normal. But I’d like to add it’s also awesome.

Surely, next step is to become totally test-driven

As of now, my previous post about People is the only explanation of what People is, and more precisely what it is supposed to be. Not to mention it is heavy and a bit messy. This one will clearly and shortly expose what you can expect from People, in the next two months. The following goals are roughly the one we plan to complete in time for our presentation at GUADEC on July:

• Let the user explicit meta contacts as an aggregation of informations from different contact sources.
• Request address books from a D-Bus service, the content of those address books being meta contacts defined as above.
• Use Google Contacts, Microsoft Live, Evolution Data Server and your phone as a contact source.

And this is pretty much it. Felipe joined us on developing backends, which is great and Ali has been working on improving the server side D-Bus support for Vala, developing the address book service. On my side, after working on the library on which will rely the address book service, I have to continue on the backends and start to think seriously about the demos.

Today, people subscribe to social networks, use instant messaging, subscribe to podcasts and blog feeds, use electronic mail, and communication devices to exchange information but more importantly to keep in contact with their contacts and their entourage. Tomorrow people may use different means to achieve this same goal, but in the end it will always be about contacting people, and maybe by then smarter solutions would be found. But in the mean time, we are are stuck with the proliferation of independent and disconnected applications and appliances, each one tearing unique logical entities away to make them fit into limited models. In simpler words, the way applications treat contacts brings a bad user experience.

Unfortunately, we cannot really do much about it, but we can still try to attenuate the effects on the Free Desktop by providing a unified vision of who is a person to the user. The solution we propose is named “People“.

Many people agree that, in the desktop, a “people framework” is needed. Things get more complicated when it comes to define the scope of it. The People project intends to provide an unified way to access and manipulate contacts for the desktop applications. The goal is not, at first, to gather the pieces and simulate unity, but more to bring the tools allowing to do it in a smart way, among other things. In People, we consider that each contact source is incomplete and provides just a restricted vision on contacts (the way they are represented and the way we can act on them). With that vision, contact sources can be as numerous and lightweight as needed to cover every place where the notion of person appears: LDAP, Google Contacts, Facebook, MIT Public Key Server, Telepathy, EDS, phone address book…

Among the possible top level components that People aim to bring, a service providing meta-contacts (gathering all the little pieces of contacts and bringing back the notion of unique persons) is fundamental, as well as a synchronization solution (to update or enhance whatever contact source from another one). Another idea would be to provide a service managing ephemeral contact-related information (like the presence status of a person) to be shared among applications. An obvious and really great use of People would be an address book management application.

The idea behind the People Project is people sanity for the desktop: when some start to talk about amazing people integration in GNOME, the first step is to get consistency around the notion of a person. As the semantic of a person can’t be defined as a standard, we have to allow and exploit all the possible representations of it.

There are tons of possible applications to be explored: meta-contacts in Empathy, Gimmie or Soylent, integration with Seahorse, personal presence handling, activity framework, contact relationships, multiplayer games… People also fits the definition of what the address book component should be in the Online Desktop.

People is architectured around two libraries: a low level one to build backends and a higher one on top of which will lay a D-Bus interface. That interface must not be tainted by People as other implementations could come up. The libraries are developed using the Vala programming language. We want to allow backends to implement custom interfaces when it makes sense so we are not heading to a less common denominator syndrome. As an example, a relationship interface could be implemented by backends supporting FOAF. We have neat feature ideas that we take care to bring with several hot spots in mind, amongst which stand memory usage, network bandwidth usage (use on mobile devices) and i18n (name representation, automatic phone number formatting, …).

The idea that gave birth to People came up during a discussion I had one year ago with Felipe Contreras. It took some time for us to realize the potential of it. Few months ago, Ali Sabil got interested and passed it as a university project to get some time to hack on it, which brought some helpful hands as well. Lately, the development of People has been more and more active. We are constantly questioning our work in an iterative process to get the better implementation we can provide and each added feature is tested. Our effort aims to provide a working and validating implementation as soon as possible (with the release of a first usable version by June). There is currently a resource request for the People project at Freedesktop.org.

We hope to give a talk at GUADEC to get more people interested!

Few months ago I wrote a bug report on the freedesktop.org bugzilla to ask for means to start a new project. The goal of that project, called “OpenIM” was to gather effort on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols. In the bug thread and on the pidgin mailing list, a discussion started to determine if freedesktop was the right place to host that kind of project (i.e. support reverse engineering and documentation of proprietary protocols) and a lot of people joined it, agreeing that such an effort was needed, regarding the poor and all over the place documentation parcels (at least referring to the MSN protocol ones). Those people included valuable guys from amsn, pidgin, pymsn, jabber, and other worthy individuals of the IM field.

Instead of freedesktop, the pidgin guys proposed to host the initiative on IMFreedom, a Foundation they did setup as a façade when they got justice problems with AOL. We all agreed that using IMFreedom for OpenIM would make more sense. That gave birth to a brand new wiki to collect our efforts.

Be interested, sweat, contribute!

So, lots of good things are happening to me these times. Well, I guess.

Studies are soon-to-be-finished and I actually began my final year internship that ends in June, when I’ll graduate. For one week now, I have been a trainee at Nokia, Helsinki (Finland). This is quite a big move for me, since I never really left France until now. I’m really enjoying that new environment, this is challenging to adapt, on a personal side. I’m working in the OSSO Multimedia team at Nokia and I got surprised of how my arrival went well, people are really cool and I’m enjoying to be there, that’s a great opportunity to learn from them and actually discover the “big company” world, even using open source technologies. I’m sure that experience will bring me a lot and I’m not waiting for less on that.

So it’s Sunday night and I’m in Brussels (Belgium), spending some cool time with friends in the hotel hall. That was my first FOSDEM and I enjoyed it. Well, the classic thing about FOSDEM is to say that it was too short, and it was, but I can add my very own observations as well. The top advantage of such conferences is to gather and share some words with cool and respected people that you already know, like the Collabora crew and the GNOME community or meet with guys you aspire to share with, like the Vala developers. It’s also still refreshing to spend time with friends that are usually just too far away from you. FOSDEM is just maybe too subject-wide and not a lot of the talks grabbed my attention. As a comparison, GUADEC talks were a far lot more oriented to my fields of interest.

That conference was also the opportunity for Ali and I to share a bit about the project we’re working on, People. People is an unified address book management framework and I’ll blog about it very soon.

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Helsinki and try to begin well my second week there. The real difficult thing is to keep myself alive (i.e. feeding and basic other things like that) but I enjoy the freedom I have there and all the free time I can use (to hack a lot on People, eventually).

Hello everyone,

The Pymsn developers are happy to introduce you to Pymsn 0.3, the brand new version of the python MSN protocol free implementation. This release is the result of about one year of unsteady development, during which Pymsn was completely rewritten to support the latest version of the protocol: MSNP15.

We are proud to announce that we reached our goal, and you can grab the tarballs from here: http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/pymsn/

Features brought to you by this release are :

- Best MSNP2P implementation : avatars and custom emoticons
- Yahoo messenger contacts support : chat and presence
- Live Address Book support : full contact and group management
- Server side contacts aliasing
- Offline messages support
- MSN Spaces
- Content Roaming support : avatar, display name and personal message storage
- Full support for HTTP and HTTPS proxies
- Support HTTP Polling transport
- No threads, fully asynchronous
- Caching system

We would like to thank everyone who helped to make this release happen.

The new telepathy-butterfly is out as well : http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/releases/telepathy-butterfly/

Yesterday, four of my classmates and myself gave an hour long lecture on Erlang/OTP. That lecture was followed by a two hours long lab. It’s been a while I wanted to share about Erlang, I read a lot about it but unfortunately, I never found some project I was interrested enough to dive in. I now have an idea but the usual problem is showing up : not enough time.

So the presentation covered the Erlang language, with its roots (the Ericsson lab, industrial use), its paradigms (functionnal and concurrency oriented) and syntax (that reminded Prolog and OCaml to the attendance). I mentionned the capabilities offered by the OTP framework (generic behaviours, supersivion trees, hot code swapping, …) linking all that to reliability and availability concepts as we got a fault tolerance lecture few weeks ago.

The lab was based on a simple messenger application from the Erlang getting started tutorial. Given the amount of time, I structured it as a “fill in the blanks” exercise. All went OK and people seemed happy with their working system, at the end. That was really a great feeling to explain processus interaction and deal with students mistakes while helping them. It’s also great to open their eyes on an unknown technology, as they now could choose to pick it up to solve some industrial challenges they could run into during their career.

On my side, I’m now gonna find time to start that Erlang project I think about. I really need to get skills on it as it’s definitively part of my fields of interrest. That could help to find a related job later.

This weekend, Ali got his msnp2p stack polished so we could work on some p2p integration in pymsn. This led display pictures (aka avatars) to land into the library. That means we are really close to release the new version of pymsn on which we’re working for several months now.

Today, as we were implementing display pictures in pymsn, I wrote the telepathy-butterfly (the MSN connection manager for Telepathy based on pymsn) part for avatars, which was a good opportunity to test the new feature. This closes the list of features to implement into butterfly before a release as well, since I got groups and aliasing (you can nickname your buddies) working in the past days. Contact handles format was changed to support Yahoo contacts in butterfly (as pymsn, covering MSNP15, allows it).I’ve tried to integrate the pymsn offline messages feature into butterfly but I wasn’t pleased with it so it’s sleeping in a separate branch for now. However, I’d like to get full membership groups management too to be able to add/remove contacts, block them, etc.

The next screenshot shows empathy displaying my personal MSN account using telepathy-butterfly. I’m really glad that we are finally getting concrete things to show

I finally wrote a freedesktop.org project request for the OpenIM thing that Ali and I (and certainly lots of other people involved in IM protocols reverse engineering) would like to see come up. The request is a bug report on freedesktop bugzilla, please bring your observations and ideas! Here is quoted the text of the proposal :

This is about a new project that I would like to see come up under the fd.o banner.

I’m part of the pymsn project. Our goal is to provide a full implementation of the latest MSN Messenger protocol for interoperability purpose. So far the project is kind of hosted by Telepathy since it’s the base library for telepathy-butterfly but this is clearly not the place where it should be.

Based on that observation, we would like to build an OpenIM initiative. Such a project would aim to the gathering of people working on the opening of closed instant messaging protocols.

One of the most important goal in this would to have centralized shared documentation on protocols and a clear follow up of features implemented in each project.