GibPhone / News: Recent posts

Firstly, I feel it is necessary to apologize for the long silence regarding the project. The team is very busy with school and other affairs and ultimately there is very little or no time left for slightly more awesome things. Fortunately, a large break is coming up, and at least I will be devoting almost all of my time to the new release. Here are some of the things I will be working on:

*UML diagrams of the entire 1.0 release. Everything with be fully documented and specifications will be so precise that if anybody wanted to write up an implementation for a class, the requirements would be very clear (much like the TopCoder contests). Also, I would like to see what we can do about a class status system much like the Mono Project, so it is easy to tell what needs to be contributed.... read more

Wednesdays are no longer the busiest day of the week because of college work, but because of GibPhone as well. The full, functional implementation of this website is complete. Obviously it is aesthetically pleasing BUT it is XHTML 1.1 compliant as well. Hopefully, this will add to the advancement of this project very much into the future...

Some more changes have been made to the GibPhone development tree and it has been decided what GibPhone 1.0. Here are a few things that you can expect:

-GibPhone 1.0 will not be released with a plugin set. A lot of our time up until now has been spent on plugin development when we should really perfect the core first. For this reason GibPhone 1.0 will be released only as a core.

-The core will use XML to save the list of contacts. The schema will be enforced and thoroughly documented.... read more

Ahoy! A unilateral decision has been made to freeze the current feature set. Any and all feature requests will be bumped up to the next major release. Until then, Gibphone is set at this:

The AIM client will have basic support (everything we currently have an interface for should be supported, and some other things should be supported as well, details to come)

The GibPhone Speex client will have basic support.... read more

I know its been a while, but I just want everyone to know that we are still here. We are currently working to make Gibphone actually work, we are tired of releaseing buggy Gibphones, it seems like we are getting closer to a release, but at the moment I cannot give an estimate, one thing this release will have is a setup wizard, to easily set up your accounts for your first time run. I realized that the current method was confusing and unintuitive so we are making it better. Alot of the stuff is already done in the SVN, although not the wizard yet. If you want to stay up to date, I would suggest you check it out.... read more

These folders now reside in the nCode project, also here on sourceforge. We figured that Speex belonged more with the nCode project than with gibphone, which is why it has left as well.

Using the svnadmin dump and dumpfilter, the Gibphone SVN no longer contains any record of those folders, and the revision numbers have changed (although I asked it not to do that). This means that updating Gibphone's SVN will require a fresh checkout, as attempting to update revision 238 will cause an error in TortoiseSVN, since it will not believe a revision 238 exists. I am not sure if other clients have this, but just to be on the safe side, a clean checkout is recommended.... read more

Recently, we took over the nSIP project after years of inactivity. All of our current nSIP and nSDP code and trackers have been moved over to that project site (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsip). Everything involving nSIP or nSDP will also cease to be updated on the GibPhone SVN repository, however we will leave what is currently there for archival purposes. All new code should be checked out from nSIP's SVN repository.... read more

This update is long running and pretty big. For one thing, IProtocol has been reworked and refactored into many different smaller interfaces. So that an IProtocol developer can cuztomize exactly what they need. Also there are a few new classes for call functions: Sound (capture and playback) IVocoder(encoding and decoding) , INetworkProtocol(sending and recieving data) and IPhone (the parent of all these functions). The IPhone deals with telling each of the other things what to do, there is an abstract implementation of each of these interfaces that deals with the basic stuff.
Another thing that that changed is the way events are thrown between classes. Its now easier and less prone to typographical errors. Another new class called Event has two methods called Register and Fire. A CoreEventListener Registers a certain delegate, it gets put in its invocation list and when the fire method is called each delegate in the fire method is invoked. There is one of these Event objects in static classes with the same name as the interface it belongs to without the 'I'.
Another change is an increase in the extensibility of features. There is now a GPMethodAttribute that can be put on methods in an interface and for each method with the attribute a menu item is created so new features implemented in an interface will automatically be available. Even state based methods like sign on/sign off.... read more

Tonight I uploaded the source and binaries for version 1.1, which is actually much more than just an incremental release. Most notable, it is possible to parse existing session descriptions with ease. I have also included some constants to make RTP/AVP programming easier and the API looks a lot more like JAIN-SIP's SDP library. I did this because they had some ideas that I really liked regarding design, but I still think that our design and code is better.... read more

We haven't announced it ever before or even talked about it amongst ourselves, but somehow we released SDP.NET last night. Currently it should be able to create valid session descriptions and convert them to string form for sending. The next release, which will come in two or three days will include the parsing of session descriptions from strings into the data structures. Some attributes that are supported by the IANA will also be included.... read more

Today I put up the files for the next release of SIP.NET. I've implemented 5 out of the 6 methods (only invite to go) and 9 out of the 44 headers. There's a lot more in RFC 3261 on higher transaction layers (stateful elements, etc) that will not be added until later. The next release will include INVITE and the rest of the headers. Hopefully we'll have full asynchronous transfers, support for TCP and TLS, and responses. After that, the stack is done and we can move on to providing stateful elements that make use of a stack.... read more

If you wish to discuss anything gibphone related, please join the #gibphone channel on EFNet. It is here that we will openly communicate about development and where you can find forum regarding feature requests or issues (independent of the tracker system, which we encourage you to use as well).

We've recently had some requests to join the GibPhone project; if you too are interested please drop one of us an email and we will conduct a brief interview.

Today I put up the files for SIP.NET 0.2, which contains a working SipWebRequest class (although without support for asynchronous transactions). It's a bit rough around the edges, but the request engine will be polished for the next release, and it should be trivial to send requests. Responses are also easy to implement and those should be done as well.

As always, we welcome any contributions you may feel inclined to make and we actively encourage freelance participation. It's bailed us out of some pretty deep holes in the past and we are very appreciative of the community.

Finally, we have released the preliminary revision of SIP.NET. We named it 0.1, but that is probably closer to 1 than it should be. So far we have a UriParser and a header framwork that allows you to define your own headers and have them automatically parsed and dealt with upon reciept of a response or sending a request. Oh, and these definitions are swappable at runtime :)

It's a very basic skeleton, but we value your input and would like to hear comments and suggestions from you. I compulsively update the SVN for this branch and checking out will ensure you have the latest version.

I apologize for not letting you guys in on this sooner, but I am pleased to announce that we have officially started development on SIP.NET, the first free .NET SIP stack. Together with Speex.NET and GibPhone, GibPhone will be able to interoperate with the Asterix PBX and anything else that can understand Speex. What about Cisco PBX's, you say? We thought of that too!

With the next release of GibPhone, you will be able to swap out any layer in the communication stack. The network layer, the encoder/decoder, the session manager, whatever. That makes writing support for a new codec even easier!... read more

SpeexPlugin is now at its 1.0 release. It can now do everything required of it by a Gibphone IProtocol and can be used fully in the plugins, no problem. There may be some minor bugs still in the release but most of them were squashed.

-James
Right now internally we are working on porting a SIP stack written in C into C# so that we can write plugins using it to allow better and more secure connections that will work with other programs now and in te future. More details on this to be released at a later date.... read more

We decided that because SVN is faster than CVS that we should move over to the new technology so we can spend less time waiting for cvs updates/commits and more time actually programming. So if anybody was keeping up with the cvs please move over to svn. You can check the sourceforge documents to help you checkout the code.

-James

P.S. Gibphone is being worked on extensively right now and will be available for public download soon, however if you want to get an early peek you can download and compile the source from the svn.

Today we realease something to make Gibphone even better. Until now all information about your contacts were stored in multiple plain text files which is not very secure. So I worked on this and decided that the easiest and most useful solution is to implement a SQL database for everything. All information is now stored in an Embedded Firebird Database. This allows for not only secure storage but also allows for complex SQL queries of the giblist and the like, something that could be useful for more complex plugins. There are some other minor updates in the plugins but they mostly are just to make the new SqlGibs and Accounts work. Download and enjoy.... read more

I wrote an article detailing how the Plugin Engine of GPCore so if any of you want to learn more about how it works to better understand how to create plugins for Gibphone. The Article can be found at http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/EventPluginEngine.asp. If you have any comments about how to make the article better any suggestions would be appreciated thanks.

-James

After much waiting, we are happy to announce that version 0.6 is ready for release. With this release, we have officially split the Core and it's plugins into different file releases, due to how segmented the development has become. This is good because it allows us to make radical changes to one plugin without affecting anything else. The only necessary piece is GPCore.

The Core itself has been updated significantly, and some plugins may have to be minorly updated to accomodate changes in IProtocol. We have also made it much easier to extend your own AccountPanel and retrieve extra information needed to initialize and sign on to your protocol. Documentation has been added and updated too.... read more

Because we are so...committed (ahem) to those that use our project, we have started to upload builds to the CVS repository. We commit builds very very often and it's a great way to see what's really going on with development. It also helps us make sure that we always have the latest copy. FolderShare just doesn't cut it anymore.

As always, keep us posted on what you think by using the trackers, forums, and mailing lists. We welcome emails too.

Major update for Gibphone. We now again have an actual interface however this time they are all through our plugin interface. Currently we have a buddy list plugin and what do you know it docks again. Also we have a tabbed IMWindow that supports HTML messaging. Our last plugin is a simple HTML logger that will save all of your conversations.

Also implemented in this version is two new Protocol supports for AIM and also for Jabber. These are implemented from the open source librarys: OscarLib for the AIM and agsXMPP for Jabber.... read more

After several months of silence, we are proud to announce that version 0.5 of GibPhone has been released! The changes are numerous and revolutionary, so much so that we felt it necessary to skip 0.4 and go straight to 0.5.

Regrettably, nothing docks on the side of the screen anymore. But this is only because GibPhone doesn't have an interface anymore, besides the sparse plugin manager. And what a wonderful plugin manager it is! It allows nearly every single aspect of the GibPhone experience to be extended, and the possibilities will only become more endless in the future.... read more

There were two minor problems with version 7 and they are both fixed in this version.
The first is that when you closed the form the program remained running in the background and as you can imagine that is a pretty serious issue. I was able to figure out where the problem was happening and now when you close the program it will no longer remain open.
The second issue was that we did not put in any way to disconnect from a person besides closing the entire program. That is also now fixed and the form is updated to allow you to hang up a call.... read more

It's been more than a month now since the last GibPhone update, but that just means that we were so busy working on it and the changes were so radical that an update was unfeasible. All in all, the GibPhone engine is completely different.
As of now, there is no more real interface. Unfortunately, this means that GibPhone no longer docks on the side of your screen. The plus side, however, is that GibPhone is now a fully functional and fully extensible plugin engine. The only thing we specify are the central data structures and a means of sending events so that they can be heard by everybody with only adding a reference to the Core. We also include interfaces to act as guidelines for providing specific functionality.... read more