Greetings! I am proud to announce the first test/beta version of the IM Gateway plugin for Wildfire. The goal of the project is to provide transports to legacy IM services through seamless integration with Wildfire. At this point, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and IRC support are all included. However, this is a very early beta and I am making this available now because I can not anticipate all of the ways in which the plugin will be used, so rather that hold off and try to think up everything that could go wrong, I’'d like to get it out there for folk to try out and get back to me with bug reports. While the plugin should not damage your legacy IM account (ie: destroy your buddy list), it may lack functionality you were expecting here and there. Likewise, I can only really test the plugin on a server that has a few users on it. I do not know yet how it behaves on a larger server. So please be aware of a general statement of “use at your own risk” regarding the plugin.
That said, I highly appreciate anyone who will try it out and get back to me with whatever problems you are running into. At this time we support registering with the transports, logging into the legacy networks, syncing up your buddy lists, and private chatting. Unlike my Python based transports, I am able to use the internals of wildfire to make the buddy list synchronization very smooth. You have no idea how jealous of that I am when it comes to the Python transports.
The following important bugs are known to exist at this time and are in my issue tracker:
Adding/removing/updating of MSN contacts does not yet work. There was brief support for it but something about it was breaking the connection with MSN so the functionality has been disabled.
Transport sessions are not properly threaded yet, so you may see issues where, for example, it takes a while to log into IRC and that holds up other transports logging in.
MUC/Groupchat support does not exist yet. This is especially important in regards to the IRC transport because IRC is typically a chatroom focused protocol. That functionality is “coming soon”. =)
At this time, I would not recommend using the plugin on a high volume server unless you are simply interested in having a large number of people test it out to see how it flies.
The plugin can be downloaded from here. It will not show up in available plugins via Wildfire’'s build in mechanism until it has reached version 1.0. Wildfire 3.1.0 Beta 2 is required at a minimum.
I look forward to hearing feedback! Please post feedfback, bug reports, feature requests, etc in this forum. ((ducks and covers))
it destroys your buddy list…i know you said it shouldn’'t affect you buddy list but i went back to my legacy AIM client and it was and more then 3/4 of my buddy list was GONE!
onything i can think is that my buddy list was totally full …maybe you only store a certain amount which is less then AOL stores so when i went back only a few were left? let me know…hopefully my friends will write me
ps. when adding users you should make some wizard that automatically appends the aim. or icq. to the user name. i don’'t think many of my users will realize how to actually add non “jabber” users to their buddy list.
I’‘ve built an emergency update (1.0 Beta 1a) that should dodge the problem you are seeing. It does have a side effect of making adding/removing/whatever buddies not clean itself up as well on the AIM side, but that’'s better than wiping them. =( Hopefully this will be fixed in a better manner soon.
Theoretically the transport already supports this. =) There is a “gateway protocol” that the plugin implements that takes a legacy username and converts it to jabber format. So appends the @aim whatever and does whatever munging it needs to do, like MSN email addresses show up as jadestorm%nc.rr.com@msn.whatever. So the support on the transport side is there. I know Psi takes advantage of this, other clients are capable of it but I don’'t know if they do. =/
say for example my “dumb” AIM user goes over to use my new spark client they hit add buddy and type their user name in…it doesn’‘t add it to aol it adds it to the local list....name@jabber.site.com instead of name@aim.jabber.site.com…there needs to be an obvious way to do this cause they won’'t get it .
We’‘ve only started the work on making Spark really easy to use with Transports. But yes, we’‘ll definitely hide all the ugly extra JID stuff from Spark users so that it looks like I’'m just typing an AOL buddy name and not something like joeuser@aim.example.com.
IRC as well? In this first release??? What a pleasant surprise! All this while your post mostly emphasized on the other major IM transports. You’'re more energetic than I thought. Well done, Daniel!
Thanks =) There was a lot of interest in it and some good java libraries out there … “why not”. =) Hope it’'s useful without groupchat for the time being though. =/
=) What am I looking at here? I’‘m assuming we’‘re having some encoding problems. (if it’'s ICQ… what else is new… I hate ICQ ) But could you elaborate a tad?
Hey Justin, had you ever used another AIM transport before? (PyAIMt, aim-transport, something like that) Or was this your first time? Reason I ask is… if you had, I just discovered what may have caused it.
Though, some offline contact is in Online list somehow, and others are represented with UINs only (maybe i need to specify nicks myself). And there was huge red error list when i started Wildfire 3.1.0 Beta 2 first time (gateway was installed with Beta 1).