Duncan Mac-Vicar P.


Facebook support: First milestone reached

with 30 comments

So, I have been working some weeks on this, and today I reached the first “usable” point. Screenshot:

facebook screenshot

As you may know, Facebook has a chat service. For me at least is slowly becoming the place where I have more people talking to me, and as you may also guess, the value of social systems is very tied to the number of users.

Sadly, Facebook guys where not smart enough as the Google guys and brought yet another damn protocol to this protocol overpopulated world. Then came the worst part. They announced something that was not there and promised Jabber support. One year later nothing has yet happened.

For a such popular service, one starts to think whether waiting another year is worth for a protocol that is so popular. As I wanted it myself now, at some point I decided I was willing to implement it even if a Jabber version was available later.

We already have the problem that users expect to see Google talk in the Kopete list, because developers don’t figure out that grandma does not know what Jabber/XMPP is. So a good improvement would be adding the concept of “services” where we could add a protocol by just saying “it is just jabber, but with this server settings, this logo and this name”. That path would allow for a easy move to other XMPP protocols later.

But for Facebook, no more wait. Yesterday I was able to use it for first time to chat, so I am blogging about it.

Next steps:

  • Add more error handling
  • Fix a bug in the contacts status when they go offline
  • Put it into kopete or playground svn
  • Make an openSUSE package ;-)
  • Cleanup. I started over the testbed plugin and it added some stuff that probably I don’t need
  • Proxy support. I coded the engine using QNetworkAccessManager so it is KDE independent. Only the Kopete plugin is KDE based, so I haven’t looked into proxy support and other stuff

Other stuff with less priority:

  • Adding contacts from the client
  • Configuration (there is no much to configure)

Written by duncan

May 20th, 2009 at 9:19 am

Posted in Software

Tagged with , , ,

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30 Responses to 'Facebook support: First milestone reached'

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  1. Nice work!

    As you are using QNetworkAccessManger, you will be able to use my KDE implementation KIO::AccessManager. This way you should get everything KIO supports (proxy?).

    Urs Wolfer

    20 May 09 at 9:39 am

  2. Great ! Will be useful ! Thanks.

    gaboo

    20 May 09 at 9:48 am

  3. Awesome! Is there any way to try this out yet? Or do we need to wait for it to be in playground?

    psteyn

    20 May 09 at 10:04 am

  4. Great! This was really missing in kopete :-) i hope it goes quickly into kopete and not only playground. Things tend to get lost there sometimes..

    Beat Wolf

    20 May 09 at 10:09 am

  5. Friking awesome!

    Dread Knight

    20 May 09 at 10:11 am

  6. you’re my hero :)

    jack

    20 May 09 at 10:25 am

  7. Bueno !

    Thanks a lot for working on this Hope it will get in kopete soon

    Simon

    20 May 09 at 10:54 am

  8. This has been waited for long! This is the reason I’m using Pidgin instead of Kopete (in KDE4.3b1). Let us know how to try it out!

    Risto H. Kurppa

    20 May 09 at 11:06 am

  9. Really great work man!

    opensourcecat

    20 May 09 at 1:33 pm

  10. This is awesome. When do you expect it to be in Kopete?

    Dhaval Patel

    20 May 09 at 2:55 pm

  11. Nice, fantastic work!

    Jorge

    20 May 09 at 9:21 pm

  12. [...] : – Facebook support : First milestone reached (Blog de Duncan Mac-Vicar) – Cuando la vida y el trabajo son un juego (El [...]

    Comparte un Kopete con tus amigos en Facebook : Blogografia

    20 May 09 at 9:35 pm

  13. [...] Fuente y otra Fuente [...]

    El Blog de Exe Montenegro » Post Topic » Un Kopete para Facebook

    20 May 09 at 10:26 pm

  14. ¡¡Bien!! Voy a ser la envidia de mis amigos guindozeros, Bah ya lo soy . . .

    PEdro

    20 May 09 at 11:15 pm

  15. Idea: if the protocols are implemented as classes, couldn’t you simply use C++’s support for subclassing?

    e.g: subclass JabberProtocol as GoogleProtocol.

    p.s. I am a C++ developer, but have never looked at Kopete’s code.

    Michael "C++" Howell

    21 May 09 at 12:18 am

  16. [...] : – Facebook support : First milestone reached (Blog de Duncan Mac-Vicar) – Cuando la vida y el trabajo son un juego (El [...]

    No title

    21 May 09 at 5:13 am

  17. COngratulations Duncan!!! But I’ve got a question. Can the facebook plugin work on KDE 3.5.x, or Kopete 0.12.7 ??

    TurboMAC

    21 May 09 at 5:59 am

  18. Great new feature … was wondering if it will ever be there.

    E@zyVG

    21 May 09 at 8:36 am

  19. Very good news, especially since now both KDE and GNOME in openSUSE 11.2 will have Facebook chat support (it’s being added to Pigdin as well)

    Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy

    21 May 09 at 11:32 pm

  20. [...] done, including the recent new release that incorporates the latest KDE4. Novell employees do some good work on Kopete and other programs. The first openSUSE Community Week took place on the 11-17 May 2009 and as an [...]

    Novell News Summary - Part I: A Little Bit of OpenSUSE | Boycott Novell

    24 May 09 at 6:21 am

  21. [...] week I blogged about Facebook support for Kopete, just after I was able to see my buddies for first time on the [...]

    Facebook on Kopete, take II at Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

    24 May 09 at 11:43 pm

  22. [...] Nel frattempo, per ulteriori chiarimenti a riguardo, cliccare qui! [...]

    Facebook e Kopete… ci siamo quasi! - Crismon’s Blog

    25 May 09 at 12:59 am

  23. [...] week I blogged about Facebook support for Kopete, just after I was able to see my buddies for first time on the [...]

    Duncan Mac-Vicar: Facebook on Kopete, take II | Techie News

    25 May 09 at 1:10 am

  24. [...] is really man, Duncan Mac-Vicar P. is working to add facebook support in Kopete. So I made a PKGBUILD to build his nice plugin, obviously you can find it on [...]

    BaSh’s Blog » Kopete Facebook Plugin

    25 May 09 at 2:20 am

  25. You are very gentile for make this plugin

    Thanks a lot :)

    Greetings from Chile

    zuargo

    21 Aug 09 at 5:39 am

  26. Seems like recently the plugin stopped working :(

    Lukas

    1 Dec 09 at 6:37 pm

  27. Hello, any progress on this plug-in? It should be very usefull for many people, but it is very buggy and not working now.

    corwin78

    4 Jan 10 at 12:23 am

  28. [...] May 2009, seeing that nothing happened, I announced that I was working on Facebook support for Kopete and released a prototype on github. The plugin was not perfect, and [...]

    You don’t need Kopete Facebook plugin anymore « Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

    11 Feb 10 at 12:54 pm

  29. Please see http://duncan.mac-vicar.com/blog/archives/644

    duncan

    11 Feb 10 at 2:39 pm

  30. [...] and other chat programs, to their Facebook Chat solution. In May 2009, seeing that nothing happened, I announced that I was working on Facebook support for Kopete and released a prototype on github. The plugin was not perfect, and [...]

    Duncan Mac-Vicar: Anda tidak perlu lagi plugin Facebook chat untuk Kopete « Bintang 1992 Weblog | Buglink nge-Blog

    15 Feb 10 at 10:53 am

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