Communication as a Service - what Telepathy is bringing to the KDE Software Compilation

Speakers: George Goldberg

There's Akonadi for PIM, Nepomuk for the semantic desktop, and for real-time communication, there's Telepathy.

Telepathy is the freedesktop.org framework for real-time communication and collaboration. It is a modular framework built around DBus, which allows applications to easily make use of it's features. We can, of course, build traditional instant messaging and VoIP applications with it, but it's real power lies in enabling easy integration of real-time communication and collaboration features into any application.

Imagine the possibilities... playing games with your friends whilst chatting to them on Jabber; sending a file to someone directly from a Plasma Folderview; video-chatting with your co-workers whilst collaborating on a presentation from inside KOffice. But the excitement is not all in the future. Already Telepathy has made it possible to share your desktop with a friend whilst chatting to them in Kopete and send a file to a contact from within the Dolphin context menu.

As well as enabling new features in applications, Telepathy integrates deeply with the pillars of KDE, in particular with Nepomuk. Contacts and presence information, among other things, are stored in Nepomuk, making this information automatically accessible to all applications, even those that know nothing of Telepathy.

This talk will introduce the Telepathy/KDE project, showcase some of the fantastic work that has already taken place, and provide some food for thought on where this framework can take us in the future.

A supplementary workshop will take place later in the week hosted by the Telepathy/KDE and TelepathyQt4 developers. The aim: to introduce KDE developers to the Telepathy libraries and get started adding communication and collaboration features to existing applications. Everyone is welcome,even if you know nothing about Telepathy yet. (Wednesday at 14:00 in Area 3).

George Goldberg

George Goldberg is a student of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. He is also a Software Developer with Collabora Ltd. His first major contribution to KDE was helping to relaunch the Bugsquad, although most of his time is now spent on integrating Telepathy with KDE software. George enjoys sailing, surfing and medium length walks on the beach.