People have recently been showing interest in using Swiften, Swift’s C++ XMPP library, for building their own XMPP applications. We therefore created the Swiften Developer’s Guide with a tutorial-style guide to Swiften (including examples), and made it available together with the Swiften API Documentation. If you’re interested in creating an XMPP client or component, be sure to give these documents (and some of the examples from the Swift code repository) a look!
We just released the next Swift beta, beta8. The major focus of this release was fix some crashes, problems, and papercuts from the previous beta(s). For a full list of changes, see the Swift 1.0beta8 release page. The list of outstanding cases is getting shorter and shorter, so this will hopefully be one of the last few betas before 1.0. This also means now is the perfect time to give Swift a shot, and give us your feedback!
I've recently been experimenting with using Eclipse CDT as IDE for Swift development. One of the handy things is that Eclipse CDT has support for parsing compiler error messages, allowing you to quickly navigate to the failing source code line by simply clicking on the error message. Although Eclipse CDT supports all the compilers we use for Swift out of the box, I was still missing the easy navigation for fixing failing CPPUnit tests. Since the error parser (just like almost everything else from Eclipse) is extensible, I wrote a small plugin for parsing CPPUnit error messages.
It's been a while since we released the previous Swift beta. As a result, the sixth beta is quite packed with bugfixes, speedups, and general improvements. The list of changes is too long to describe here, so head on over to http://swift.im/releases/swift-1.0beta6/ for details and downloads of the last Swift beta, and let us know what you think in the MUC room – swift@rooms.swift.im.
It’s only been 2 weeks since we released the first public beta of Swift, and we already got a lot of feedback. Thanks to all of you who joined the MUC and sent us their comments and bugreports!
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!
Several people have been asking us about the status of Swift lately. Rest assured, we’ve been hard at work in the past months, despite all the job changes, house movings, and marriages slowing us down sometimes. And we have proof: below is a Gource visualization of the Swift Git repository from the past months (and we definitely wouldn’t fake that). Swift is getting very near to the beta stage, so stay tuned for more updates!
Although I love the thrill of speaking in public, I unfortunately don’t get to do it as often as I used to (once, maybe twice a year lately). The few times I do speak, though, I’ld like it to be as good as possible. That’s why I was very interested in O’Reilly’s announcement of Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker, and so I put the book on my shopping list right away. Not having heard of the author before, I was hoping for the best (light, interesting, with a touch of “funny”), but expecting the worst (“I am your presentation God; people sell their own mother to hear my voice; although you are not worthy, I will lower myself to your level and give some insight in why I am so fantastic.”). After receiving the book in the mail, I read it from the first page to the last in merely one day (a new personal record). Needless to say the book exceeded my expectations.
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.
When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by Swiss clocks and watches (actually, mostly anything that was made in Switzerland). However, my attention in watches seems to have faded shortly after I got my very own black & red strapped Swatch: only a few years later, I replaced the Swatch with a digital Casio with built-in calculator, because it looked flashy and cool. I have to admit that the watches I wore (if any) haven’t really improved much since then. However, since I recently came to be without a timepiece again, I took the opportunity to read up on watches before buying a new one. I ordered the first well-rated book on the subject I could find, which happened to be Gene Stone's The Watch. It turns out that this book was one of the most entertaining books I recently read, and I must admit I have become a watch fanatic ever since I read it.
Although the primary focus of XMPP: The Definitive Guide is explaning the XMPP protocol and all its extensions through text and illustrations, we also included a few Python code examples to help people get started with implementing their own ideas. In fact, we devoted a whole chapter to building an XMPP application, starting out with a simple bot implementation, but gradually extending the application into a full server component. For people who want to try this out for themselves, we’re releasing the source code of all code examples, including a simple echo bot, and different variants of the CheshiR microblogging platform XMPP interface.
