Avahi to be considered harmful

Let me paint a picture as it's come into focus for me recently. Apple develops a protocol called mDNS for zeroconf via multicast DNS. They call it Bonjour and are serious enough about making it a standard they release a free software library called mDNSResponder to support it which runs on GNU/Linux, OSX, and Windows.

A community project, Avahi, implements their own mDNS suite for GNU/Linux. Avahi adds some nice features, such as dbus support. To help apps use either option they support compatibility with mDNSResponder's API.

It's great to have this sort of cooperative-competition, but they took this a bit too far by printing a nag warning when their mDNSResponder compatibility API is used by an application and otherwise pressuring mDNS-using apps to drop support for mDNSResponder.

I sincerely hope Python projects aiming to implement mDNS build against the mDNSResponder API, for cross platform support if nothing else, and encourage their users to avoid using Avahi when questions about this nag page come up.

Concordance register.py

I have the main Python callback in Concordance working now to handle <iq/>, <message/>, and <presence/> elements. Eventually it'll only handle these elements when they're directed to the server, otherwise the server will route the message to it's destination without Python needing to process it first.

examples/register.py demonstrates user registration handling using ElementTree (or at least the start of the process for now). The result is shown here.

Concordance lives

Concordance-XMPP now listens and responds to new XMPP connections with basic XML parsing via expat.

David has been working with me to maintain Windows compatability. I'm working on SASL support and the Python callback API.

With luck the first (very early) release will be ready this weekend which can handle logging in and intra-server routing between users.

Python 3.0 - first extension module

After hours of hunting down docs and debugging my build environment (turns out I had a 3.0-alpha5 lurking around mucking up setup.py)..

Python 3.0 (r30:67503, Jan  2 2009, 00:20:15) 
[GCC 4.3.1] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import concordance
>>> concordance.__file__
'/usr/lib/python3.0/site-packages/concordance.so'
>>>

New Year, New Project

The first day of 2009, PySoy's copyright notices updated and a few tickets closed, I hit a point where I really need a decent XMPP server.

I've started a new project called Concordance, a XMPP/Jingle server written in C (message routing and RTP mixing) and Python 3.0 (authentication, login, MUC handling, etc).

The goal is a framework giving Python full control over the server, for nearly unlimited configurability, while having the speed to serve a large user base with a minimal of CPU use.