You can get the plugin by opening Eclipse’s Install new software menu, adding http://el-tramo.be/eclipse as a plugin repository, and selecting the ECPPUnit plugin from the list of available software.

These are the changes since 1.0-beta3:
* The chat window shows the total unread message count, not only the selected chat.
* Room subjects are now shown on join.
* The Find Room window now resizes correctly.
* The Windows installer now puts start menu shortcuts in a sensible place on re-install. This will take effect the second time you run an installer with this fix.
* Fixed a crash involving disconnects or reconnects.
* Various small fixes

Full details at http://swift.im/releases/swift-1.0beta4/

As with the previous betas, please grab the new release and let us know how you get on – what’s good, what’s not so good, and just generally discuss the project in the MUC room – swift@rooms.swift.im

We decided that, before moving on to implementing the remaining missing features, we would first fix a bunch of small-yet-annoying ‘papercut’ bugs, and quickly release a new beta. This way, we hope to make the Swift experience a bit smoother for our valiant testers while we are busy implementing some of the larger changes. So, if you’re running Swift on a frequent basis, or would like to jump into our beta feedback cycle, head on over to the Swift 1.0beta2 page, and download the latest beta (we even have Ubuntu packages now!)

We are aiming to put out new betas on a regular basis, so stay tuned for more Swift goodness!

The first public beta (preview) of Swift is now released, and we’d like you to help us. Primarily, we’d like feedback from you as to what needs to be done now, and also to find any issues – either technical or in usability – with what we’ve already done. This isn’t a final release, so you shouldn’t download it unless you’re willing to find issues in it, and report them back to us so we can improve it.

The roster

A chat room.

We’ve got Windows and Mac binaries ready so far. The source compiles on Windows, Mac and Linux, and with a little coaxing I even managed to give a demo on an N900 Maemo phone at FOSDEM this year.

The Swift 1.0-beta1 release page has links to the downloads and the source, visit it now and get started with Swift, and then use the mailing list, or the MUC room (swift@rooms.swift.im) to start discussing it.

(Note: For some reason, the video starts out a bit flaky, but it gets better after a few seconds)

O’Reilly recently released the book Beautiful Testing, a collection of essays about testing and QA in general. As I mentioned earlier, I wrote an article in that book on (unit) testing XMPP protocols, using Swift as a motivating example. Since the book’s scope may (oddly enough) not always be as interesting for developers in general, I released my article under a Creative Commons Attribution license (thanks to the good folks from O’Reilly for encouraging us to do this), which you can find here (or directly from my Git repository). The original excerpt from the book (including the index, list of biographies, and all the fancy artwork) is also available for download under the same license.

I of course encourage you to buy either the PDF or dead tree version of the book, as all the proceeds of the book go to charity.

We’ve been making progress steadily over the last 6 months. One of the first things we got going was the chat interface:

It’s minimal, but that’s quite comfortable for us, at the moment. We’ll review that over time, so you may see buttons and icons appearing there in the future.

More recently, we’ve spent quite a while working on the contact list:

I was initially reticent to use custom rendering code for Qt’s views but in the end it seems to have turned out alright for us.

So where does that leave us – will it be another 6 months before we blog again?
I hope not – Remko and I are working towards an internal 1.0 Release Candidate quite hard now, and it hopefully won’t be a vast amount of time before we post about that. After 1.0RC, we’ll start making the builds gradually less private (to manage the amount of feedback we get) until we work to the big 1.0 release day.

Although there are many types of testing being done in the XMPP world, the chapter focuses on the beauty of testing the functionality of XMPP protocol implementations. After a brief introduction on XMPP, it starts out with a description of unit testing simple IQ request/response protocols, and then gradually moves on to higher-level testing of more complex, multi-stage protocols such as session initialization. As you might expect from a developer like me, the chapter is quite heavy on the (C++) code, but I’m told it compensates for the rest of the book

As with all other books in the O’Reilly “Beautiful” series (which started with Beautiful Code, but has since been followed up by Beautiful Architecture, Beautiful Teams, Beautiful Security, and Beautiful Data), all proceeds of the book go to charity, in this case “Nothing But Nets” (which provides mosquito netting to malaria infested areas of Africa). This means that I can plug this book as much as I want, and still have the feeling I’m actually doing a noble, unselfish thing. (contrary to when I casually mention that you can buy our book XMPP: The Definitive Guide at very sharp prices these days). Some time after the book’s release this summer, I will even make a free version of the chapter available here, so check back soon!