babble.client 2.0a1dev

Babble: Instant messaging client for Plone

Introduction

Babble: Instant Messaging for Plone

Babble is an instant messaging service for Plone. It consists of babble.client as the Plone front-end client and babble.server, a Zope2-based messaging service, as the backend chat service.

Communication between the client and server is achieved with JSON packets sent via XML-RPC.

The client consists of an Online contacts portlet with which you can initiate new chats.

Instead of using the provided portlet, you can also consider using Babble together with actionbar.babble .

Chat sessions occur in modal dialog chatboxes and make use of JQuery Ajax polling to provide seamless, real-time messaging.

During inactive periods, the polling interval gradually becomes longer until it reaches a specific (configurable) maximum polling interval.

Please note: even thought the polling values are configurable, it’s not advised to make the minimum polling interval less than 5000 milliseconds.

Features:

• Remembers open chat windows on page reload

• Chat windows can be minimized

• New messages automatically opens chat window

• An ‘online users’ portlet provides a list of currently online users

• Configurable polling intervals

• Clickable URLs recieved via chat messages

• Requests to the messaging service are password authenticated

• Can be integrated with the ActionBar of actionbar.panel

• Can run on a different server than the messaging service

Compatibility:

Tested to work with Plone 3.3.5 and Plone 4

Documentation:

Full documentation for the Babble project can be found at http://babblechat.org

TODO:

• Remove the DTML variables by getting them from the DOM. Then we can use jUnit for unit testing the js.

Changelog

2.0a1 (2011-10-05)

• Add more finegrained message timestamps. This fixes the problem where only the chatbox in the currently active browser tab was updated. [jcbrand]

1.5 (2011-09-16)

• Include permissions.zcml from Products.CMFCore and changed setup.py dependencies for Plone 4.1 compatibility [jcbrand]

• Add GenericSetup xml file, babblechat_tool.xml, to enable configuration of the portal_babblechat tool. [jcbrand]

• Use Zope3 resource registries. [jcbrand]

• Escape html before sending. [jcbrand]

• Urlize messages and on the sender’s side. [jcbrand]

1.4 (2011-03-18)

• Full release.

• Removed superfluous logging [jcbrand]

1.4b3 (2011-02-04)

• Javascript fix in chat.js.dtml [jcbrand]

1.4b2 (2011-02-03)

• Layed some groundwork for QUnit javascript unit testing [jcbrand]

• Javascript fix for an IE7 quirk [jcbrand]

• Only show the portlet search bar when it’s overflowing [jcbrand]

• Fixed the portlet search bar’ rendering in IE7 [jcbrand]

1.4b1 (2011-01-18)

• Fixed to work with email addresses as usernames. [jcbrand]

• Show users’ fullnames in the chatboxes and the portlet. [jcbrand]

• Simplified the polling system and provide better polling defaults. [jcbrand]

• Send anonymous users to a login_form when they click on contacts in the portlet. [jcbrand]

1.3.4 (2010-10-18)

• Fixed display of single number seconds if in 0-9 [pilz]

• Converted message dates from server back to local time [pilz]

1.3.3 (2010-10-01)

• Added 5 second timeout to xmlrpclib requests [do3cc]

1.3.2 (2010-05-21)

• Removed the dependency on collective.js.blackbird being installed [jcbrand]

• Fixed a bug whereby LDAP users are not visible [jcbrand]

1.3.1 (2010-05-07)

• Unicode fix in utils.py [thomas_w]

1.3 (2010-05-06)

• Full release [jcbrand]

1.3b3 (2010-04-28)

• Fixed repeating page section rendering problem [jcbrand]

• Added URL recognition [jcbrand]

1.3b2 (2010-04-17)

• New polling solution via the doTimeout plugin instead of setTimeout [jcbrand]

• Fixed ajax calls when in portal_factory as context [jcbrand]

• Made the ‘Who’s online?’ portlet’s heading editable [jcbrand]

1.3b1 (2010-04-12)

• Updated the README [jcbrand]

1.2 (2010-04-09)

• Removed the option from portal_chat to bypass XML-RPC [jcbrand]

• Bugfixes in tests and fixed getConnection AttributeError for utils.py [jcbrand]

1.1 (2010-04-08)

• Tweaked jsregistry.xml to gain Plone3 compatibility [jcbrand]

1.0 (2010-04-08)

• Initial release [jcbrand]

Contributors

• JC Brand <[e-mail]>

• Cillian de Roiste <[e-mail]>

• Wolfgang Thomas <[e-mail]>

• Patrick Gerken <[e-mail]>

• Cleber J. Santos <[e-mail]>