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Windows Update is one of those things which should be a standalone application. If dozens of game companies can automatically upgrade their games using standalone apps, then so can Microsoft.

But then again, they would want to make the standalone app use Internet Explorer's rendering component. Is this the same evil? If so, then well, Messenger itself uses the IE rendering component. So does Rhymbox, and that is practically Messenger's competitor!

Please, somebody, make a *simple* Jabber client.

Rhymbox ?

The client should also be able to sign into other messaging services on the client side...

Trillian ?

Rhymbox looks like the best of the Win32 clients that support the main chat protocols [MSN, Yahoo!, AIM and ICQ] and is also Jabber-compatible to make the imminent migration to an open protocol painless.

I would try it out except I'm running Knoppix right now and loving it :-D

Sometimes, they base their whole GUI around IE.

What, you mean like RhymBox?

So WINE will not be able to run these programs.

Are you sure about that?

That's a bit harsh, considering that all the popular Jabber servers were blocked from ICQ and AIM years ago (i remember when ours was), and the MSN transport is as far as I know, unmaintained.

I used Jabber as an inter-IM solution for a long time, but eventually gave up and just use Gaim instead. Simpler. I still use Jabber, I'm in the unusual position of knowing a lot of people who use it, so it's imperative that I have a connection to it.

Jabber has 3 problems right now:

1) Lack of people on it, the whole network effects problem.

2) Lack of killer features. After all these years they are finally getting the basics nailed, stuff like file transfer. Though this ties into point 3. Jabber really needs some unique features not found elsewhere to convince people to use it... I'd like to do really sweet integration with the Linux desktop at some point but it hasn't happened yet.

3) Lack of quality clients. On Linux this is being rapidly solved by Gaim (though it's not there yet), and on Windows RhymBox is excellent with its only real problem being that it's pure Jabber - great for work, not so great for home. Sure it supports transports, but like I said, they are a somewhat failed experiment.... too easy to block, and it's easier to get better integration through client side code.

The article quotes RhymBox (I wouldn't have named a client that with another program called RhythmBox out there, which actually makes more sense as a name!), which seems like a bit of a MSN Messenger UI derived client. Upon first play it's very nice!

Free for non commercial use and apparently has source (according the the "You can modify software" clause in the license".)

Otherwise, I use JAJC, which is nice, but written in Delphi so not entire like the WIndows UI everywhere. But since when was any other IM entirely like the Windows UI?

RhymBox?

You are, once again, completely missing my point. As you appear to consider me a foe for being concerned about the world outside of KDE, I'm not expecting you to really listen, but nonetheless I must make these points.

I have not said, OOP in GObject C is inherantly better than OOP in Qt/C++. I said it was more practical for the real world, because it makes it easier to reuse code. Big difference.

[sigh] Let me show you something. Let's take what is, IMHO, the best Jabber client for Windows, RhymBox, and break it down into its component parts:

• Internet Explorer. Used to render the GUI and for much of the application logic (ie it's an IE DHTML application). Language: unknown.
• MSXML: provides XML and XSLT facilities. Language: unknown.
• ATE Jabber Engine. Language, unknown but appears to be at least in part written in Visual Basic. Until recently it used JabberCOM, written in Delphi, an OOP variant of Pascal.
• Front end code: Langauage: JavaScript.
• Backend code: better integration between the front end and Windows. Language: C++.
• WSH: various scripting objects. Language: Unknown.

Virtually all pure (ie not written to be portable) Windows jabber clients use either JabberCOM or ATE as their jabber engine. There is little code duplication in this field.

Q: On Linux, how many Jabber or Jabber-capable clients reimplement their jabber engine?

A: All of them.

Despite the fact that code on Windows is predominantly closed source, RhymBox is way more modular, and reinvents the wheel far far less than is the norm on Linux, even for highly modular apps. In contrast, on a platform overflowing with freely available code, we have massive flamewars because framework foo is written in the "wrong" language.

What went wrong? What is the missing part of the picture here? Why do we blow goats at sharing all this code we write, and why do Windows developers do it all the time, and take it for granted?

They have COM. We have nothing like it. KParts fails the test on grounds of language and political neutrality, not to mention licensing (which is in fact a problem, despite the fact that you constantly deny this[1]).

I know you can bind stuff from QObject or GObject into other languages. That's not good enough. Firstly, it's at least partly manual. Secondly, it's one way - you can use KParts in Python, but you can't write them. You can write new plugins for GObject based systems in C++ if you so wish, but they cannot then be reused by C code (or other bindings).

The problem we have is that the usefulness of an object model is directly related to how much stuff uses it. Nobody wants to use an object model, no matter how cool it is, if there are no objects available through it. COM is ugly, but everything uses it, so by definition it is miles better than QObject, CORBA or anything else we have for that matter.

[1] The licensing issue is a red herring. People say, "nobody forces the GPL on you" - except if I have to use that in order to access some code, regardless of how that code is actually licensed, then you could say it is forced on me. That's not good enough, even if you ignore proprietary developers entirely.

Or perhaps more helpfully, Jabber Inc, who provide all the support and stability you need for corporate IM.

Again, lots of different clients. I think Psi's GUI is nice. It certainly isn't as crufty as ICQ. But YMMV on this one.

Check out RhymBox. It's one of the coolest looking clients around, and Seb is willing to do corporate customisation - for a price of course ;) Meanwhile I'm working on getting it to run on Linux via Wine.

I'm afraid a lot of programs, even seemingly trivial shareware apps, do wierd things regarding the Win32 API. It's not uncommon to find apps passing corrupted or bad data into the APIs, missing out vital calls, abusing COM/ActiveX etc.

For instance, look at RhymBox, a simple free chat app for Windows. Looks fairly innocent doesn't it? But this program is an IE DHTML application embedded using the WebBrowser control into an ATL C++ container. Hmmm.

In particular Microsoft apps have a greater tendancy than most to take shortcuts, or use badly defined behaviours of the API. Just because it looks simple, doesn't mean it actually is. When you've done some Wine debugging, maybe you'll rethink those assertions.

Amen to that. A friend of mine who develops the rather fine Rhymbox Jabber client for Windows recently decided to try out Redhat 8, and one of the things he noticed was that the quality of the translations was not good (he is dutch). In particular, although GTK had been translated so the buttons were in Dutch, the Anaconda texts had not been, giving a jarring effect. He said the translations were also not very high quality - although I hadn't really suspected it before, just like art and code, there are good translators and not so good translators (apparently).

What is really, really needed, at least in the open source community, is a centralised translations centre, where free software projects can upload their .pot files for translation, and teams of translators organised by language pick strings out of the database and translate them. Sort of the equivalent of the LDP or kde-look.org. By combining all the translation teams together, it's easier for new translators to get on board, it's easier for instructional material on how to make good translations to be distributed, and hopefully speed and accuracy of translations should go up.

No, I don't have time to do such a site. Anybody?

Good examples would be Oddpost, an email app that launches from the web, and RhymBox, a Jabber client.

Note that I've spoken to the froods who did both of these projects, and they've been constantly hitting the wall in terms of what IE can do. RhymBox now uses quite a lot of ActiveX code in order to work around the general lameness of using DHTML .hta files for the ui.

I help run the theoretic.com with Adam Theo, which is most definately not a public testing server.

First up, we don't have AOL or ICQ transports, as we got too popular to remain unnoticed ages ago so it's firewalled now. The MSN transport still works fine though, and Yahoo, well, nobody used that :) You can always use an external transport (and many do)

Now for the good news. There are 2 admins in 2 separate timezones (London and Florida time), so there's normally somebody about if you want to chat to an admin. We don't track the latest releases unless we need a bugfix, so the server is stable. We haven't rebooted it since February as far as I can remember.

We also have some features other servers don't. For instance, the SMTP transport is mondo cool. If you send an email to user@im.theoretic.com, it'll be turned into a jabber message. If you reply, it'll be turned back into an email. You can add email addresses to your roster as well if you want to fire off quick messages.

Finally, we try to be as polite as possible. If we're restarting a transport for whatever reason, or need to reboot the server (rare now), we'll send a public broadcast message about 10 minutes before so you can finish up conversations etc.

RhymBox, which is a great little Windows client already, and the new version will totally rock, tied with theoretic should hopefully ease most of the pains that have put off non geeks from using jabber up until now.

RhymBox - an open source client in DHTML