As many of you may have noticed. the IM Gateway plugin version 1.0 was released alongside Wildfire 3.2.3. (sorry guys, I can’t call it Openfire until the official release is 3.3.0 ) The release was quite a step for me as I’ve never actually released a 1.0 of anything! Typically I’ll take the attitude of having to get everything perfect before I can release a 1.0. One of the things that Jive helped me realize is that I could label some of the problem children (Yahoo, ICQ) support as experimental and basically release a 1.0 with good solid support for the rest of the protocols. That hadn’t occured to me before and I’m quite glad to see 1.0 out. Amazingly enough, there haven’t been a lot of bug reports. I hope that everyone who is using it is enjoying it.
I must admit that pushing Yahoo and ICQ support to the side “hurt” a little. However the library I’m using for Yahoo isn’t particularly stable and the ICQ support in joscar isn’t entirely golden either, and I didn’t want to see the release drawn out way into the future. I am pleased to say that the Yahoo library is getting some love as we speak and there’s been improvements to the ICQ support submitted to the joscar team and I’m working on a couple of other improvements. I would consider myself highly familiar with the OSCAR (AIM and ICQ) protocol itself, but not at all for Yahoo. (I’m referring to the low level details of how the protocol itself works, in theory the libraries I use ought to hide the details from me) As it turns out, I’m getting more familiar with the MSN protocol as I ended up taking over as lead developer of Java-JML. Thankfully, I’ve got some help on that front as well. It’s always nice to see help coming in from many angles!
So what’s coming next? Well, my highest priority is to get ICQ fixed up. Once the Yahoo library improvements come about, I’ll be aiming to solidify that as well. Of overall new features, I’m waffling between groupchat and file transfer. Groupchat is now the most voted for feature for the plugin. File transfer, on the other hand, is something I’ve never had an opportunity to get involved in, so generally I’m interested in learning how it works by diving into it. Buddy icons are also highly voted for. Such a seemingly pointless/unimportant feature, but I’m with you all; it’s one of the features that gives me the biggest joy to see in a chat client. They’re just so cute. ;D
Why did I title this Looking Throught The Fiery Gate? Well… it’s a gateway plugin… it’s in Openfire/Wildfire… yeah.