Swift Blog

Last sunday, we finished our week-long Swift Hackathon, and it was a great success, leading to Swift 2.0-beta1! Here’s a list of the things we achieved during that week.

First of all, the goal of the week was to find and fix as many bugs as possible. This is what our ‘hackathon bug count dials’ were displaying at the end of the week:

In only one week, we found 19 bugs, and fixed 64! Not a bad result for our first hackathon, don’t you think? As you can see from the trend, we put a big dent in the list of open bugs:

And if fixing all these bugs wasn’t enough, we found the time to do some other things on the side as well during the week:

• Together with Olly Betts, we finished our Debian packages, and submitted them to Debian. So, expect both Swift and Swiften to be available from the official Debian repositories soon!
• We set up a build for the brand new Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)
• We started fixing and cleaning up translation strings

Thanks again to all the people who have helped us during this excellent week!

After another year of development, we’re happy to announce that we released our first Swift 2.0 beta! We encourage everyone who is interested in helping us with testing to try out this new release, as it has many bugfixes and enhancements (see the release notes for more details).

Thanks to the hackathon week (of which details will be posted shortly), we believe this first beta to be pretty stable. Nevertheless, should you find some bugs, please come and tell us about it!

We’re just halfway through our Swift Hackathon, so we thought we'ld update you about the progress we’ve made so far. In fact, a screenshot of our live hackathon week bug counter sums this up quite well:

That’s right: in merely a couple of days, we managed to fix 50 (more than half!) of the open bugs, and found 17 new bugs. And what’s more: we still have the whole weekend ahead of us, so you still have a chance to join us in fixing, testing, and improving Swift!

A big thank you to all the people who have been helping us out so far!

It’s that time of year again: Google announced which students they are going to sponsor for contributing to open source projects. This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming 3 students at Swift, who will be working on some very exciting projects.

This summer, you’ll see the following new faces hanging around the Swift room:

• Cătălin Badea will finally bring us the long awaited “Conversation History” support, using the newly minted Message Archive Management XEP
• Mateusz Piękos will be adding shared whiteboarding functionality
• Yoann Blein is going to implement screen sharing using Jingle

Since Kevin and I could only mentor Cătălin and Mateusz, and we really wanted to have Yoann join us as well, we decided to bring in some extra help this year. Tobias, who not only has participated in GSoC 4 times as a student, but also is a top Swift contributor, and authored practically all of the Swift Jingle code during GSoC last year, will be mentoring Yoann in the screen sharing project.

As you can see: great times ahead!

All the cool kids are doing it, and so are we: starting Monday April 23rd, we’re holding a week long Swift hackathon! We will be focusing for a whole week on bugfixes, and at the end of that week release the first beta of Swift 2.0, the next major Swift release. Everyone is invited to join us online in our chatroom at swift@rooms.swift.im, and start hacking with us. And if you can’t or don’t want to fix bugs, we also need plenty of people to help us with testing Swift extensively that week.

(Thanks to Tobias for suggesting this).

It’s been a busy summer for Tobias Markmann, one of the XMPP Standards Foundation’s 2011 Google Summer of Code students. He has been working on implementing File Transfer support for Swift, using the fresh Jingle XMPP protocols. I’m happy to announce that we integrated Tobias’s work as an experimental feature into the main Swift branch, where it will be further developed and brushed off before being enabled in our nightly builds and releases.

For those interested in the nitty gritty protocol details: file transfers are negotiated through the Jingle File Transfer protocol (XEP-0234), using SOCKS5 (XEP-0260) as the main transport, and In-Band Bytestreams (XEP-0261) as fallback. To improve connectivity, we use both the NAT Port Mapping Protocol and the UPnP Internet Gateway Device protocols to allow connections through most firewalls, and SOCKS5 relaying proxies in case all else fails.

The new feature has been tested for interoperability against (slightly modified) development versions of both Pidgin and Gajim, which, together with the Pidgin-based Adium, cover a large XMPP user base. After both clients update their protocols to track the newly published Draft specification versions, all 3 should be able to exchange files seamlessly.

What still remains to be done is lots of testing (both internal testing, user testing, reliability testing, and interop testing), bugfixing, and some refactoring here and there to clean up some of the code (which already is in very good shape). Our end goal is to reach a rock solid implementation, with a near guarantee that file exchange will always work (which experience teaches us is far from trivial).

To conclude, we’ld like to thank Tobias for contributing this great new feature to Swift, for providing valuable protocol feedback to the XSF, and for laying the foundation to other exciting Jingle-based features (including voice/video conferencing).

Yesterday, Google announced the 1116 students that were accepted for this year’s edition of the Google Summer of Code, 5 of which will be working with the XMPP Standards Foundation. We’re very happy to welcome both Tobias Markmann and Vlad Voicu, who will be working full-time on Swift this summer, implementing file transfer support and conversation history respectively.

We have to mention that these weren’t the only proposals we received. Most of the proposals we received this year were of good quality: we suspect that the teaser tasks we put up for potential students made it possible for both the students and us to get an idea up front of what should be expected. However, based on experience from previous years, we decided we should only accept 2 students, to ensure that we could give our full attention to making all projects successful (including fast integration into a Swift release). We’re convinced that both Vlad and Tobias will live up to their expectations, and implement some of the most requested Swift features today!

Finally! After 2 years of development, we’re happy to finally announce the first full release of the Swift IM client! In this first release, we have focused on building a user-friendly messaging client, with all the basic features you would typically need for having real-time conversations. In future versions (which are already in the works as we speak), we will be extending Swift with more features.

We would like to thank Isode for sponsoring time for Kevin to work on Swift, Flosoft for providing our download infrastructure, Dave Cridland for the logo, all the translators who helped us make Swift available in different languages, all the code contributors, all of whom should be listed on our About page, and all our beta testers for giving us feedback and bugreports throughout the whole development period!