mindshare

Current Work

My thesis is slated to be handed in sometime in mid February. This puts a closed time-frame on work remaining before the alpha release when real people (users) will get to squeeze the software in their greedy little hands :-).

Give the time constraints the main priority is to get tree and file swapping implemented. Events have, however, conspired to make this not so easy. I lost some important code (formatted it into oblivion) that was not too trivial to write. To save time I am cutting XML as the back end data format. Right now much of the core already works on XML. The alternate encoding will be BEncoding much less stressful to work with. It solves many problems associated with sending binary hashes inside XML that cant contain binary characters. Right now I want to strip out all the XML code and replace it with BEncoded messages instead. The work needed to do this may be too much to be worth while for the alpha.

Presence support was rewritten to be more general. Integrating this back into the Mindshare client is a bit of a pain but the result should be a more responsive presence service.

All point to point links will use BEEP for transport. Before the code loss I had BEEP working over a JxtaSocket quite well. This uncovered a bug with closing JxtaSockets and BidiPipes that is now fixed. JxtaSocket still does not support keepalives so the protocol will include a keepalive packet. In the future a second BEEP channel could be used for one to one chat.

Heading up to the release I will try to post more often so check back.