<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/" xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its" type="topic" style="overview" id="overview-communication" xml:lang="sv">

  <info>

    <revision version="0.1" date="2012-02-19" status="stub"/>

    <link type="guide" xref="index" group="communication"/>

    <credit type="author copyright">

      <name>Phil Bull</name>

      <email its:translate="no">philbull@gmail.com</email>

      <years>2012</years>

    </credit>

    <title type="link" role="trail">Communication</title>

    <desc>Instant messaging, networking, social media, email, and calendaring support.</desc>

  </info>

<title>Communication and social networking</title>

<list>

 <item>

  
Connect to instant messaging and social networking services

 </item>

 <item>

  
Set up multi-protocol connections with web services or other clients

 </item>

 <item>

  
Handle mail, online contacts and calendar services

 </item>

</list>

Get your users connected and communicating with their friends and contacts through instant messaging, social media, and email. GNOME's extensive communications stack gives you high-level, abstracted access to complicated instant messaging and email protocols. For more specialised communication needs, there's access to the nuts and bolts through lower level APIs too.

<media type="image" mime="image/png" src="test_comm1.png" width="65%">

 
Empathy instant messaging client

</media>

<section id="what">

 <title>What can you do?</title>

 
For connecting to instant messaging services, use

 Telepathy. It provides a powerful framework for

 interacting with the user's instant messaging contacts, and has support for a

 wide range of messaging protocols. With Telepathy, all accounts and

 connections are handled by a D-Bus session service that's deeply integrated

 into GNOME. Applications can tie into this service to communicate with

 contacts.

 
Create multi-player games or collaborative editors that integrate with the

 desktop-wide instant messaging services. With the Telepathy Tubes API, you can tunnel an arbitrary protocol over modern instant messaging

 protocols like Jabber to create interactive applications.

 
Allow users to see other people they can chat with, and find printers, shared files, and shared

 music collections as soon as they connect to a network. The Avahi

 API provides service discovery on a local network via the mDNS/DNS-SD

 protocol suite. It's compatible with similar technology found in MacOS X and Windows.

 
Handle users' local and online address books and calendars with Evolution

 Data Server (EDS). It provides a way of storing account information and interacting with... 

 
With Folks, you will have access to a single API for

 handling social networking, chat, email, and audio/video communications. 

</section>

 <title>Code samples</title>

 <list>

  <item>
Change the IM status
</item>

  <item>
Fetch a contact from a Gmail address book
</item>

  <item>
Scan the network for zeroconf printers
</item>

  <item>
Something with Telepathy Tubes
</item>

 </list>

</section>-->

<section id="realworld">

 <title>Real-world examples</title>

 
You can see lots of real-world applications of the GNOME communications technologies in open source projects, like the examples given below.

 <list>

  <item>

   
Empathy is an instant messaging app with support for a wide range of messaging services. It uses Telepathy to handle connections, presence, and contact information for all of the protocols that it supports.

   
(<link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Empathy">Website</link> | <link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Empathy?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=empathy.png">Screenshot</link> | <link href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/empathy/">Empathy source code</link> )

  </item>

  <item>

   
With Telepathy Tubes support, the GNOME Games collection was able to add multi-player gaming support through the Jabber protocol.

   
(<link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Games">Website</link> | <link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Chess?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=gnome-chess.png">Screenshot</link> | <link href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-chess/">GLChess online multiplayer code</link> )

  </item>

  <item>

   
Avahi support allows users of the Rhythmbox music player to see shared music collections on their local network, using DAAP.

   
(<link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Rhythmbox">Website</link> | <link href="https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Rhythmbox/Screenshots">Screenshots</link> | <link href="https://git.gnome.org/browse/rhythmbox/tree/plugins/daap">DAAP Code</link> )

  </item>

 </list>

</section>

</page>