Introducing Greem

After a short hiatus, I finally resumed work on my new Jabber/XMPP client project, which I christened ‘Greem’. The main goal of the project is to create a mobile Jabber/XMPP client for the Qtopia platform. The nice thing about Qtopia is that its target audience keeps on expanding: besides running on the GreenPhone (of which Trolltech was kind enough to provide me with one), Qtopia has recently been ported to the Neo 1973 (OpenMoko), and even Windows CE and Windows Mobile. In this post, I briefly describe what the expectations and the goals are for Greem, and how Psi fits into the picture.

The goal of Greem is to be a clean, simple Qt/Qtopia client, built completely from scratch, using lessons learned from the Psi project. Since it is my intention to keep Greem as simple and clean as possible, some advanced features from Psi will not be available: multiple accounts, customizations that are only relevant to 1% of the population, … However, development will be focused on things that Psi also needs in the near future:

For the first release(s), not every part of Greem will be written from scratch, though. Although I already have a major part of the low-level XMPP server connection handling coded up, Greem will initially use Iris as its backend for connecting to a server. Anything beyond the connection (i.e. XMPP data structures, stanza handling, …) will be done outside of Iris. This way, the major focus can be on the front-end and general frameworks, without having to worry about the low-level implementation details (which can typically be a big hassle to get right). In the future, the Iris backend, which is connected through a very thin layer with the front-end, will be replaced by my own implementation of XMPP streams.

An update on the current status of the project will follow soon, together with some preliminary screenshots.