<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<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>
<p><em style="strong">Connect to instant messaging and social networking services</em></p>
</item>
<item>
<p><em style="strong">Set up multi-protocol connections with web services or other clients</em></p>
</item>
<item>
<p><em style="strong">Handle mail, online contacts and calendar services</em></p>
</item>
</list>
<p>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.</p>
<media type="image" mime="image/png" src="test_comm1.png" width="65%">
<p>Empathy instant messaging client</p>
</media>
<section id="what">
<title>What can you do?</title>
<p>For <em style="strong">connecting to instant messaging services</em>, use
<em style="strong">Telepathy</em>. 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.</p>
<p>Create multi-player games or collaborative editors that integrate with the
desktop-wide instant messaging services. With the <em style="strong" xref="tech-telepathy">Telepathy Tubes</em> API, you can <em style="strong">tunnel an arbitrary protocol</em> over modern instant messaging
protocols like Jabber to create interactive applications.</p>
<p>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 <em style="strong" xref="tech-avahi">Avahi</em>
API provides <em style="strong">service discovery</em> on a local network via the mDNS/DNS-SD
protocol suite. It's compatible with similar technology found in MacOS X and Windows.</p>
<p>Handle users' local and online address books and calendars with <em style="strong" xref="tech-eds">Evolution
Data Server</em> (EDS). It provides a way of storing account information and interacting with... </p>
<p>With <em style="strong" xref="tech-folks">Folks</em>, you will have access to a single API for
handling social networking, chat, email, and audio/video communications. </p>
</section>
<!--<section id="samples">
<title>Code samples</title>
<list>
<item><p>Change the IM status</p></item>
<item><p>Fetch a contact from a Gmail address book</p></item>
<item><p>Scan the network for zeroconf printers</p></item>
<item><p>Something with Telepathy Tubes</p></item>
</list>
</section>-->
<section id="realworld">
<title>Real-world examples</title>
<p>You can see lots of real-world applications of the GNOME communications technologies in open source projects, like the examples given below.</p>
<list>
<item>
<p><em style="strong">Empathy</em> 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.</p>
<p>(<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> )</p>
</item>
<item>
<p>With Telepathy Tubes support, the <em style="strong">GNOME Games</em> collection was able to add multi-player gaming support through the Jabber protocol.</p>
<p>(<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> )</p>
</item>
<item>
<p>Avahi support allows users of the <em style="strong">Rhythmbox</em> music player to see shared music collections on their local network, using DAAP.</p>
<p>(<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> )</p>
</item>
</list>
</section>
</page>