Open Source Messaging Application Development: Building and Extending Gaim (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

by Sean Egan (Author)
Key Phrases: renderer transfer, gpointer data, tracker item, Sean Egan, Close Figure, Hello World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
<p>Are you enamored with instant messaging? Would you like to learn how to create your own messaging application? This book shows you how, by dissecting Gaim&emdash;the world's most popular open source instant messaging application. Authored by the Gaim maintainer, Sean Egan, you are presented a thorough overview of Gaim architecture and Application Programming Interface.</p>

<p>You'll learn how to make the most of the popular GTK+ graphical user interface toolkit. Egan guides you through the creation and installation of plug-ins, and discusses strategies involved in supporting messaging protocols like MSN Messenger, AIM and IRC. He also covers topics such as multi-platform support and internationalization.</p>

About the Author
He is a major contributor to the project, managing a team of ten core developers, and reviewing and incorporating patches.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590594673
• ISBN-13: 978-1590594674
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #805,616 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even a Gaim developer can learn from this book., August 22, 2005

By	Richard Laager - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I highly recommend this book. It covers exactly what is described... getting started with open-source development. This book won't make you a god at GTK+, it won't make you a networking wizard, and you won't be able to rewrite CVS from scratch after reading it. That would take a whole shelf of books and more. However, it WILL provide you a working knowledge of the open-source process, development tools (compilers, build systems, a debugger, version control, bug trackers), object-oriented programming concepts, a graphical application programming toolkit, network programming, internationalization, and cross-platform portability. This book uses Gaim as an example, but most of the knowledge you'll gain isn't specific to Gaim.

I'm not new to open-source development, so I was familiar with the tools listed in the book. I've also been coding on Gaim for about 8 months now and was recently promoted to developer. Still, I learned things from this book. For example, I had never bothered to find out exactly what the numbers in a patch hunk meant. This was covered in the book, allowing me to better handle patches I review. I also learned more about Unicode and UTF-8, the OSCAR protocol, and even learned a couple Gaim-specific things.

Even for an experienced developer, this book was money well spent and I'm recommending it to all my friends who want to try open-source development.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent starting point, September 9, 2005

By	Pablo de Leon Belloc "pablo" (Buenos Aires, Argentina) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

There are two aspects I'd like to mention. First, if you ever wondered how to start out in the open source development process, this book will give you a very clear picture of it. Second, it is a great starting point if you want to learn about gtk+ and gaim. I was about half the way in writing my own Gaim plugin when I found out about this book, and it was just what I needed. It also covers several other topics which might spike your interest in learning more, such as internationalization, portability, etc. And of course, building Gaim plugins and about IM protocols.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Much more than programming Gaim, August 16, 2005

By	C. Kapusta (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I always wanted to get involved with Open Source programming, but never knew just how. This book is a good introduction to the world of open source, with Gaim as the example. From learning CVS to setting up a build environment to compiling code to programming patches and plugins for Gaim, this book has a good overview of all of the above. I highly reccomend to anyone interested in developing open source applications.