# (0) 14 Jan 2010, 03:49PM: Some Recent Collabora Open Source Development:
Has it been three months since I provided a snapshot of Collaborans' open source work? Too long! Here's a taste of our work from the end of 2009 & the start of this year (and there's a lot I'm leaving out, like a bunch of Maemo work, because otherwise this entry would go on forever! I'm already several days out-of-date):
2.29.5: The contact list has been improved to make it harder to accidentally call a contact when you just intended to select a row. The accounts dialog has been reworked to reduce the number of steps when adding a new account.
Frédéric Plourde is working on Electrolysis for Collabora. Check out our notes, the Electrolysis team status board, and the Firefox For Mobile discussion board.
The photos here are all from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year, which was warm and fun. January (here in the Northern Hemisphere) is a good time to remember how nice that was.
2.29.4: Empathy is now able to start SIP video calls using the new "New Call" dialog. It also indicates whether an incoming call contains video or is audio only. The contact list can now display the protocol used by contacts, and the accounts dialog shows the accounts' status (enabled/disabled, available/busy/away/offline, etc.).
Thanks to K. Vishnoo Charan Reddy, Empathy gained icons for 4 protocols.
Thanks to Thomas Meire, a new contributor, the nick auto-completion has been improved in rooms.
We also fixed a bunch of crashes and a regression when starting a video call.
Collabora continued working on Fennec, a.k.a. Firefox for Mobile. Specifically, Collabora is helping re-architect Firefox to be multi-process, via the "Electrolysis" project. After Electrolysis separates out processes in Firefox, each window/tab will live in its own process. If it crashes or needs to be killed, then it won't take down the rest of your browser with it. Plugins will also live in their own process, which also improves your security: Electrolysis puts them in a sort of sandbox, so a badly written (or malicious) plugin can't hurt you too badly. You might have heard of this innovation in Google's Chrome browser. (Chrome is based on the WebKit engine, and Firefox is based on the competing Gecko engine.) So Electrolysis will make the UI more responsive in Firefox for Mobile, but it's not just for Firefox Mobile -- once this separation gets implemented in Gecko, your desktop Firefox will get those stability and performance improvements as well.
We released telepathy-gabble 0.9.3, with several bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for details). Telepathy-gabble is the Jabber (XMPP) connection manager for Telepathy. The development version of Gabble currently uses Wocky, a new XMPP library we're developing that makes it easier to provide more modern XMPP features. Sjoerd Simons's, Vivek Dasmohapatra's & Mike Ruprecht's recent work on multi-user Jingle (Muji) includes a lot of work with telepathy-gabble -- we're working on multi-user chat support that'll eventually allow multi-user video chat right from your desktop. Sjoerd and Vivek especially have been getting Wocky multi-user chat code into telepathy-gabble and are quite excited about it.
Ian Molton now has a working reimplementation of AF_UNIX as AF_DBUS, towards an goal of implementing in-kernel D-Bus, and Will Thompson hacked on the D-Bus specification and daemon. D-Bus is an inter-process communication system that applications use to communicate -- Telepathy among them -- and getting D-Bus running in the kernel will help performance by avoiding context switching. At the moment, AF_DBUS changes are fully buildable and operational, but lack a bus topology.
