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!

(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.

All examples are built using the lightweight SleekXMPP Python XMPP library. In fact, SleekXMPP is so lightweight that we included a version in the source bundle, making it even easier to get started implementing your own bots and components.

Do bear in mind that these examples only serve illustrative purposes for the book, so don’t expect very robust code. Although making this code fail-safe is not really our primary goal (since that would involve a lot of code that would only distract the reader), we do welcome bug reports or fixes.

The code examples are available as a source package, or directly from the Git repository (mirrored on GitHub). We will soon put a link to the package on the book’s webpage.

First of all, I used Sleek Migrate to retrieve the roster (and other) data from the server, and store it in the standard XEP-0227 format. I extended the tool a bit such that it supports Openfire’s User Import/Export format, a format generated by an Openfire plugin that is distributed with the server software by default. Using this format as input for Sleek Migrate avoids the need to create a user file manually. The changes I made to Sleek Migrate are currently available from my Git repository, awaiting to be pushed to the main repository.

I then wrote a short script that populates the Prosody data dir with the server data from the XEP-0227 XML file. Currently, the script only generates roster and account data, but adding vCard and Private XML Storage (used amongst others to store MUC bookmarks) should not be very hard. Until Prosody creates a native XEP-0227 importer, you can get the script from my Git repository.

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!

PDF

Until we launch the project and its website, you can subscribe to the Swift blog and identi.ca group to stay up to date with the latest news and developments around the project. Thanks to Dave Cridland for lending us his graphical capabilities and drawing us a pretty logo.