Status of SIP Communicator 1.0 development.

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-------------------- Periodic Status Letter 2
--------------------------

Hello all,

(Apologies to those getting the letter multiple times)

This periodic letter contains information on the state of
the SIP
Communicator project and its development. It includes a
summary of the
progress that has been made since the last edition of the
letter and a
short range plan of what are the next items on our agenda.

It's been a while since I last wrote this letter and there
are a few 
things that we've completed in the mean time:

1. First of all the SIP Communicator now has a SIP protocol
provider and 
the basis of a Media Service implementation. They are still
quite 
experimental but at least they are here and I've even been
using them 
for a few calls. As most of you might expect, JMF is the
root of most 
problems. We have trouble capturing, need some extra codecs
(PCMA, ilbc, 
g729 to name but a few) and have a problem with receive
buffers 
(reception fails if RTPManager's receive buffer is shorter
than 500ms) 
but we are working on these issues and we'll eventually hunt
them all 
down (most certainly, if you'd like to pick on one of them -
don't 
hesitate). I feel that JMF is not hopeless and most problems
could be 
fixed relatively easily.

2. We already have an MSN implementation. There are still a
few issues 
with removing groups or visualizing the right presence
status but 
otherwise the implementation is quite stable. (Courtesy of
Damian)

3. Some of you may have noticed this already, the UI contact
list works 
a lot better than before. It doesn't disappear anymore, and
merging 
contacts is quite stable. Yana has been spending time on it
lately and 
the results are obvious.

4. Damian has created keep alive daemons for icq and jabber.
I used to 
have connection drop issues with jabber and they are gone so
I am quite 
happy .

5. Jean has accepted to work on an ALSA data source for JMF
so that we 
could have decent performance for sound capture.

6. Martin has completed a .deb package. We need to resolve
an issue 
concerning the place we store bundles and once we do we'll
start nightly 
builds and a Debian repository with the package.

7. Pavel is working on an RPM package, and I think he has
completed an 
experimental version. Again, once he's done and we'll start
nightly 
builds and a Fedora repository.

Now, we have more or less completed the minimum feature set
for a first 
release so it is time that we started the bug hunt. All
contributions 
(bug fixes) will be gratefully accepted. I noticed for
example that the 
behavior of SIP Communicator on windows is quite unstable so
I encourage 
all developers to spend a week or so working on windows in
order to fix 
as many as possible.

I also noticed problems with the windows installer (think
it's not 
including all JMF libs in the PATH/CLASSPATH).

Another serious issue is message localization. I get the
impression that 
the only thing that works properly is the standard ASCII
char set. I am 
unable to write Cyrillic characters on Linux (nothing would
appear in 
the message window as I type them), and Western European
characters 
don't get properly stored in the history. I also have
someone with 
Japanese characters in the nickname and this completely
messes my 
contact list on windows.

There are many other issues actually so I think I'll enter
them in the 
issue tracker rather than going over them one by one in this
letter.

Something else that I wanted to talk about is FOSDEM. I was
thinking 
that it would be really great if we could participate in the
February 
2007 edition. I've sent a mail to the organizers saying that
we'd like 
to do a talk but I am not sure whether this is the
right/only thing one 
needs to do in order to get accepter. Anyway I've subscribed
to the 
FOSDEM lists and we could further discuss this on the dev
list if 
someone else is interested (or has experience with FOSDEM).

One last thing for this edition of the letter. Here at the
ULP, we give 
out student projects every year. Depending on their year,
students have 
50, 100 or 150 hours to work on them. Many of the projects
don't ever 
get completed but some do and I am hoping we'd manage
recruit a few 
contributors this way. I've prepared a list of these
projects and it is 
available here:

http://sip-commu
nicator.org/students

Feel free to hack on any of these if you wish, or use them
as student 
subjects yourself.


Thanks for reading!

Emil

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