The Road to Telepathy 1.0

The Telepathy communications framework has come a long way since its inception in 2005. From providing simple Google Talk instant messaging and calls for a relatively niche internet tablet operating system, it's now a key component in MeeGo—having been integral to Maemo 5 and featuring in MeeGo Netbook—as well as powering the Empathy IM client, collaboration functionality in the Sugar environment from the One Laptop Per Child project, and other platforms and applications. Over that time, it's gained support for a wide range of protocols and communication networks, with the plethora of features that that entails: file transfers, emergency calls, mail notification, account balance information, contact searching, geolocation, and so on.

Inevitably, like any expanding and maturing framework, parts of the API have had to be extended or replaced as limitations were found; since the project has strived to ensure API stability and backward-compatibility, this has lead to a certain amount of obsolete baggage, apparently redundant interfaces, and resulting confusion. Never fear! The time is coming for the project to declare a compatibility-breaking flag day, removing legacy API and consolidating the remains into more cohesive interfaces, making life easier for protocol backend hackers and, most importantly, Telepathy-based application developers. In fact, most of the prerequisite improvements have been made incrementally, allowing for a smooth migration path.

Meanwhile, work continues apace on new functionality, such as multi-party video calls and end-to-end encryption, and on improving the Qt4, GLib and scripting language libraries to simplify the use of all these features. This session will discuss recent and upcoming feature development, the roadmap for Telepathy 1.0 and beyond, and how all this can help you add social features to your MeeGo application using Telepathy.