joustlog

joscar activity update

I've been working on joscar a bit lately, and I thought I would write something up talking about what I've been doing.

I've been looking into adding iChat AV support, in the form of code to parse and send AV rendezvouses as well as recognizing/advertising the AV capability blocks. They added a lot of capability blocks for iChat AV, and I'm not sure what each one does yet.

I added a help system to JoscarTester. You can pick up a copy in CVS and type "help" in the JoscarTester console. You might need to delete part of the javac sourcepath in the Ant build.xml file (in the demo target) to get it to build from CVS; I'll fix this sometime soon.

I added a generic debug logging framework that allows you to plug in your own logging implementation. The JDK logging system (what I was using before) allows you to plug in your own logging implementation as well, but someone using joscar with JBoss said he was having trouble. The default logging implementation is the JDK logger, so logging in joscar should behave just like it did in 0.9.3.

I've made a bunch of minor improvements, bugfixes, and optimizations, due in part to Dave Griffith's InspectionGadgets plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

As I said in my last post, I've also made the changes necessary for my friend Javier's ICQ addon to plug in easily. This involved changes to a few classes, including adding a clientid value to ClientVersionInfo, as well as adding ICQ availability status parsing in FullUserInfo.

My friend Sam and I are looking into designing jouscar, the second subproject of the Joust Project. jouscar will be a higher-level interface to OSCAR, with methods like "connect()" instead of "new ConnFlapSnacBlahBlah(BlahBlah.Verbose, Blah).blahBlah()" and the like. It won't be as powerful or customizable as joscar is, because it will be designed exclusively for client use, and exclusively for clients that want to use the protocol correctly.

Today I worked on something sort of related to joscar. It's an API compatibility testing tool. It takes a jar file and generates a Java source file that calls every public method, extends every non-final class, uses every public constructor, and much more, for every class in the jar file. The idea is that the generated file uses your jar file in every way an end user developer could possibly use it.

With it, you can generate the Java file using SomeLibrary 1.0, and then try to compile it against SomeLibrary 1.1. If it compiles, then it's guaranteed that any program using SomeLibrary 1.0 can upgrade to SomeLibrary 1.1 without modifying or recompiling any code. I plan to use this to erase or minimize incompatible API changes between joscar releases.

So that's what I've been doing lately. I'll post my API compatibility tool later on, when I feel like it's ready to be released as alpha or beta.

Posted by keith at January 4, 2004 04:23 AM | TrackBack