Version 0.5.0 brings online-functionality to libsoylent. Want to launch a chat with someone? One function call. Want to see who’s online? One function call. Want to see someone’s online-status? You get it.

This release is also the last one for Google Summer of Code 2008. It’s the result of about four months of work. Phew.

The plan for the next release is that it will be a pure documentation and bug-fixing release. Also in that version: libsoylent will stop taking control of strings passed to it.

Changes

• implemented Telepathy / Mission-Control / Empathy support
• implemented various functions / methods for IM-information (get online-people, get presence etc.)
• added communication functions (e.g. launching a chat with someone)
• added an example for online-functionality
• enhanced documentation
• fixed some bugs

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Contact

Feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:

http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel

If you found a bug please report it at:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=soylent

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Let me present you the newest version of libsoylent: 0.4.0. Three weeks of hard work went into this release, and in fact so much was added and changed that we decided to skip a version-number. Sorry 0.3.0.

So, what’s in it? More or less a complete people-management-library. Our goal was to create a simple yet-powerful API that “just works”. Hopefully we managed that. If you have no clear picture of what libsoylent is or just want to know more about it, look at the examples we’ve put up on the libsoylent-page.

What comes next? Because the library is that new and fresh, much testing will be needed. If you want to help, just play around with libsoylent and report bugs that you may encounter to our mailinglist. Thanks! Besides, next to the need of more documentation and polishing, here is a list of features that will follow in the next releases:

• live-attributes (e.g. online-status)
• communication (launch applications for chat / mail etc.)
• address-book searching (atm you can only get all people)
• people association / merging

Please leave a comment on my blog if you have thoughts, ideas, criticism, feature-requests or suggestions for changing something. Just let us hear your opinion.

Anyway, if you’re working on something that needs people-functionality, why not give libsoylent a try?

Changes

• creating and modifying attributes works
• adding / removing attributes to / from people works
• attribute-mapping (for C runtime-types) implemented
• attribute-system (definition, cleanup and to-string functionality) implemented
• changes to people can be commited
• loading people from the addressbook implemented
• signals for SlBook, SlPerson and SlAttribute implemented
• integrated gtk-doc
• added a bunch of documentation
• added more tests
• added example-code (three examples)
• revised architecture
• a lot of internal-code improvements
• fixed a bunch of bugs
• added debugging functions
• a lot of polishing was done (code-cleanup, convinience functions and macros etc.)

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Contact

Bugs, feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:

http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Attributes are implemented. That means adding and removing attributes to / from people as well as modifying them works. With that come attribute-handlers. That’s basically a system which provides a way to convert runtime-types to libsoylent-system-types, so you can use arbitrary types like C-structs as attributes (for more information on that see the libsoylent API-draft). Furthermore storing and loading people (and attributes) works. Also the SVN trunk now contains some documentation and a bit of example-code.

Some important things are still on the TODO-list: some bugs have found their way into the code and want to be removed soon. Signals are not implemented at the moment, so libsoylent won’t notify you if some person was added or modified or something like-wise. And of course some more documentation and example-code wouldn’t hurt.

So, when will libsoylent be usable? The answer is: soon! Perhaps with the next release, coming in one week?

Changes

• creating, opening and deleting addressbooks implemented
• added tests for addressbook functionality
• creating people implemented
• people can be added and removed to / from addressbooks
• added tests for people functionality

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Contact

Bugs, feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent mailinglist. You can join at:

http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Changes

• created basic architecture (SlPerson, SlGroup, SlBook, SlEntity, SlEntityHandler)
• created basic test-suite
• implemented listing and creating addressbooks

Download

libsoylent is available for download at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

Contact

Bugs, feature requests, questions and related discussion go to the Soylent
mailinglist. You can join at:

http://lists.codethink.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/soylent-devel

More

More information on libsoylent is available at:

http://live.gnome.org/Soylent/libsoylent

The Southside festival was great too. Radiohead and Sigur Ros, yeah! Tegan and Sara were also amazing. Looking back I would say it was one of the best music festivals I’ve been to so far.

Nevertheless, being away for two weeks kept me slightly behind my schedule. Version 0.1 is ready but not released, because of organizational reasons. In the meantime I’m already working on v0.2.

Last week I finished the foundation of libsoylent. That basically means I thought in greater detail of the architecture (see below), designed the needed GObject classes and made stubs for most functions and methods. From now on there should be a release every week, and a solid foundation will help a lot.

The libsoylent architecture as shown in the diagram: SlBook is the addressbook where people (SlPerson) and groups (SlGroup) are stored. People and Groups are entities (i.e. objects with attributes that can be modified etc.). SlEntities are backed by SlEntityHandlers. For SlPerson there will be an EDS-handler and for SlGroup a file-handler. More handlers can easily be added (if needed).

The storage of attributes (SlAttribute) is managed by attribute-handlers (SlAttributeHandler). They are responsible to convert runtime-values to values that can be stored by the entity-handlers (e.g. a SlAddress C-struct to a VCard-string for EDS).

If you have any thoughts on the architecture I’d be glad to hear them. This week I will have more time and work on people, group and addressbook management. And of course on the first release .

Last week, besides enhancing the libsoylent API draft, I also focused on two other things: creating a detailed schedule for the rest of GSoC and getting my hands dirty with coding.

Some implemented things already work: creating addressbooks and also listing all available addressbooks. I mostly found out how to do this with libebook by digging through the Evolution source; really a huge codebase. Furthermore I refactored the little libsoylent test “suite” to better work with make check and added some tests for SlBook.

For the schedule I wrote down the tasks that have to be done for libsoylent, developed a roadmap including milestones and releases and planed when what functionally should be implemented. The schedule is available here.

The next one or two weeks I will be very busy (as you can see in my schedule). Tomorrow I’m going to the Southside music festival for 4 days, and after that I will move to my new flat share, what will probably take about a week. Luckily I started early with GSoC and will have much time after the current university term is over .