[JDEV] New developer, Unix clients, Todos...

[Steve <jms@rhythm.cx>]

Hi everyone. I've been following Jabber a little recently with great
interest. I've been wanting to get involved in an open source, open protocol
instant messaging system for a long time now. About a year and a half ago to
two years ago I put a lot of thought into writing one myself, and designed a
simple protocol and actually began coding a client and server for the
messaging system.

I started writing it because I wanted a good way to communicate with my
friends via the internet. At the time there weren't many AIM or ICQ clients
that ran well under Linux, so I set off to write my own.

I eventually scrapped the whole thing. In time new projects were developed,
and I discovered others I had not previously known about. I also heard about
IMPP, Jabber, TiK and miscelaneous 3rd party ICQ clients. I scrapped the
project since I didn't want to create yet-another-IM-system which would
eventually be rendered obsolete by IMPP.

At anyrate, I've become interested in Jabber to the point where I thought I
might want to join in and maybe code something to aid in development. I've
been looking around in the list archives and reading documentation on the
jabber architecture. I heard something of a command line unix client system
for jabber written in perl, there was one thread about it around the middle
of this month on here, but no major talk about it, or anything in the
lastest distribution (or maybe I just couldn't find it, sorry). I was
thinking about writing something that would look exactly like the write and
talk utilities commonly found in unix systems, but would use jabber. Is
anyone working on something this right now? I have plenty experience coding
in C under unix as well a little experience coding in GTK/Glib and
everything that entails, but I want to start learning perl this summer. I
also want to help Jabber out, I think its an important project that a lot of
people could use. We definitely need an open messaging system. So I thought
maybe I'd use some of my free time and my desire to learn and code something
in perl by helping out this project a little. If anyone out there has been
working on a jabberized talk and write (what I'm interested in doing),
please let me know.


Thanks

-Steve