Scavenger and Presence are moving to GitHub

I am currently re-booting my work on Scavenger (and therefore also on the Presence service discovery framework) as I need it for some upcoming research. In the process I have decided to move the source code from the Google Code pages and onto GitHub instead. In the last couple of months I have become increasingly fond of git---especially as a collaborative tool where other developers can freely fork my repositories, play around with the source on their own, and then send me a pull request when they are satisfied with their changes. This way of working has worked out extremely well in my small LaTeX YaSnippet project. I hope that switching to GitHub means that more people will consider adding to both Scavenger and Presence.

While moving the code I have also done quite a bit of refactoing and "spring cleaning". This means that the code has now been split into six (more or less) independent projects. All of these can be found here https://github.com/madsdk/

Installing the Scavenger client library or the Scavenger daemon has also been simplified quite a bit. Both the lib and the daemon now have build scripts that work on Mac and Linux. If I e.g., would like a Scavenger daemon running om my laptop, I would simply download and run this script. The script must be placed in the folder where you would like to install the Scavenger daemon, and it will then download and build all dependencies (Stackless Python, Presence daemon, diverse Python modules). Notice that in order to build the Presence daemon you need to have the Qt development tools installed.

Happy hacking!

New Presence2 Beta

I have just released the fourth Presence2 beta. In it I have fixed some serious bugs, so if you are using the older betas please upgrade now ;-)

Grab the files from the usual place.

Presence2 beta 2 released

I found some bugs in the Python lib for the new version of Presence. These have now been fixed and therefore a second beta has been released. Grab it at the Presence Google Code page.

Presence 2.0.0-b1 Released

I have just released the first beta of Presence2 (or qPresence as I also call it because of its Qt dependencies). I have put up downloadables for the daemon, the Python API, and the "daemonless" Python API (the one that allows for listening in on Presence announcements without running the Presence daemon).

Because of the new Qt dependencies you need to install the Qt library and SDK in order to build the daemon. You can fetch these at Nokia's Qt page.

Grab 'em while they're hot!

Complete rebuild of Presence

I have spent the past week re-writing Presence from scratch using Qt. "Why?" you may ask. The previous version of Presence has been working very well for a long time, but it had a bug that only appeared on 64-bit operating systems. I spent a small amount of time debugging the old code base to find that bug, and then finally decided that a complete re-write would be better. Not that the old code base was that horrible, it was just written in a mixture of C and C++ that made it a bit hard to maintain. E.g., the network related code was written in pure C using a large select() statement and multiplexing over a large number of sockets - it seems obvious that this could be coded _much_ nicer using an event based architecture.

So I decided to recode it in Qt, and let me tell you: Qt = happiness! I am no fan of C++, but when using Qt it is actually a nice language to work with. The new version of Presence is easily maintainable, because it is so simple to read and understand Qt code (at least compared to reading and understanding C). No more waiting for data on a bunch of sockets, finding out which socket has activity, forwarding the task of handling the activity to someone else, and then back to the listening... In Qt all socket activity can of course be subscribed to as callbacks, so now the Announcer class takes care of all announcement packets, the ControlConnection class talks to application(s), and so forth.

In the process of porting the daemon I have altered the protocol slightly, which means that I also had to update the Python libraries. In doing this these have also been redesigned, making them a bit easier to read as well. They both work now, though I must admit that I am not completely satisfied with the main Python lib - but seeing as it works I will probably not get to updating it any time soon.

New Presence Consumer Lib

I have just created a new Presence library - one that does not depend on the Presence daemon. This lib may be used by Python applications that only act as consumers of Presence services, i.e., application that do not advertise services through Presence but merely uses services announced by other peers.

So why did I make this new consumer-only lib? Because it enables devices that are not capable of running the Presence daemon to use Presence anyway (as a client/consumer right now). This means for example, that I can discover and use Presence services from my jailbroken iPod.

The new lib can be found in /trunk/libs/python_consumer_lib.