Whiteboard support for XMPP Protocol and New Enriched Gtkwhiteboard

[Phil Hannent]

Hello,

On 19/02/2011 13:35, Pankaj Singh wrote:
>
>
> I have been waiting for reply. Should we work on this project ?
I am not a Pidgin developer, however I develop interactive whiteboard software
for a living.  Your project is most interesting.

As an aside a couple of years ago there was an effort to standardise interactive
whiteboard formats to something called iwb:

http://iwbcff.sourceforge.net/

The effort has seen slow take up, however it is SVG based and would be the ideal
format for saving these doodles in, as it also considers things like pages,
sounds, video and links.

On a second note, it would be awesome to be able to use existing IWB software
(such as the one I develop (Lynx) or SMART or Promethean) but use an XMPP client
to do the chat and transfer part.  There is already rich content available and
having an SVG based way of passing that around would be cool.  We have customer
requests so that a trainer can be in a remote location from the students.

What is missing is a way for my software to interact with Pidgin so that a
lesson can be shared over multiple locations.  Currently there are other things
I need to work on so its not in my imminent future, unfortunately.  If you do
add API's to libpurple I would be great if you could consider that a future
plugin might want to export the whiteboard session functionality for IPC use.

With regard to your API changes question, a developer is the best to answer
this, from what I have seen them do in the past the version numbering defines
the level of API change.  The x.y.z denotes that x version is an expanded api
where anything can change, y denotes that the reserved spaces can be used and
the z is for non api changes.  This is what I believe they chose to help the
plugin developers manage their compatibility.  You can make any additions but
that will impact the length of time it takes to get deployed. 

A Pidgin developer would probably need to review the changes to be able to give
a definitive answer to your question.

Regards
Phil Hannent