Announcing the KDE Real-time Communication and Collaboration Project

Hello World! It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything here, and for that I’m sorry. The autumn was consumed by university work, and the last few weeks I’ve been discreetly coding and writing to get everything ready for this announcement. Anyway, without further irrelevance, let me present the KDE Real-time Communication and Collaboration Project. You’ve probably heard me blathering about Telepathy before, but now for the first time we have a coherent plan for world domination, concocted by Abner Silva, Matt Rogers and myself (with help from many other people).

Let me briefly introduce the project and our aims:

• Fully integrate real-time communication (think VoIP, IM, Video etc) into the KDE Plasma Workspace (do I have the branding correct?)
• Provide a fully-featured Telepathy-based real-time communication experience in the KDE SC. (loving the double-barreled words)
• Provide infrastructure for collaborative features in KDE SC applications.

So, if any of this interests you, we’d love your help. Hop in to #kde-telepathy on freenode IRC, or join our mailing list.

And, while you’re at it, why not take a look at our code so far.

The Code So Far…

Warning: this is highly experimental code which may cause all kinds of side effects, especially the Nepomuk related stuff, which is likely to make a complete mess of your Nepomuk database, so use with care.

If you’ve read the above warning and want to take a look at what we’ve done so far, here are some instructions. For the first phase of this project, our attentions are focused on building Telepathy based components for basic IM usage on top of the existing Kopete codebase. So far, you can create an account (Jabber is the only kind tested, so expect minor bugs with other protocols), set its presence and see a list of your contacts. Not the most exciting stuff ever, but with this core stuff in place, more features should arrive very soon.

Prerequisites

You need recent telepathy-mission-control-5, telepathy-gabble and telepathy-qt4. Best to install these from your distribution. If telepathy-qt4 is not provided, or older than 0.2.0, then download the source here.

The Account Management GUI

Checkout and build the account management gui from svn here:

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-accounts-kcm

Also install its plugins from

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-accounts-kcm-plugins

You can launch it by running:

kcmshell4 kcm_telepathy_accounts

And then follow the wizard to set up your Jabber account.

Setting the Account Presence

To set the account presence through a GUI (ie. bring the account on/offline), you will need the presence plasma dataengine and applet, available again from svn:

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets/presence
svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/plasma/dataengines/presence

You can then add the applet to your Plasma workspace and use it to bring the account(s) created with the GUI in the previous section on/offline.

Nepomuk Integration

Your contact list is integrated into Nepomuk by means of the telepathy-integration-daemon. Best to install it and launch it before bringing any accounts online. Code, again is in svn.

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-integration-daemon

You can run it by calling telepathy-integration-daemon on the command line.

Contact List App

Finally, in order to see our contact list, we need a contact list app installed. Currently, this is in the very early stages of development, but you can at least see a list of contacts in it (although you can’t interact with that list yet). Source code is at:

svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-contactlist (corrected)

and you can run it by calling telepathy_contactlist_prototype on a command line.

If you like what you see or have any problems with getting it working, come talk to us in #kde-telepathy. We’re very happy to help out 🙂