Hello Readers!

I am very pleased to announce version 0.5.0 of the Decibel Realtime
Communication Framework.


Decibel
=========

Decibel is a realtime communications framework, meant to integrate services 
like
CTI (Computer Telephone Integration), VoIP (Voice over IP), text based chat 
and
instant messaging.

End users find in Decibel one central place to manage all realtime 
communication
settings and can easily configure and change responses to communication
requests.

By providing a simple, DBus-based API to the services like communication 
account
management, connection to contacts, etc. Decibel reduces the complexity and
effort of accessing realtime communication technologies in applications. This
allows for integration of realtime communication technologies into 
applications
that are not focused on communication.

Decibel consists of the desktop neutral policy daemon and desktop dependent
components. These components interact with the user and his desktop 
environment
by providing GUIs for common tasks like eg. creating a new communication
account, storing passwords or contacting a friend. Using the Telepathy
specification (http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/) the Decibel daemon manages
Telepathy compliant connection managers (implementing the various 
communication
protocols) and connects them to Decibel components as required by the users
communication needs.


Motivation
----------

Today's users are relying on communication software on their computer systems.
They are forced to switch between different applications for the
different protocols and communication methods (text chat, telephony, etc.) 
they
are using. These applications usually are poorly integrated with each other,
thus requiring the users to interact with several applications to do simple
things like setting their online status to "away" on all communication 
channels
they are using.


Acknowledgments
---------------

Development of Decibel is sponsored by NLnet (http://www.nlnet.nl/) and
basysKom GmbH (http://www.basyskom.de/).

Thanks for the support you are giving!

I further want to thank the Tapioca project
(http://tapioca-voip.sourceforge.net/) for providing the Qt bindings
to the telepathy specification Decibel is using.


License
-------

Decibel is released under the LGPL version 2.1.


Version 0.5.0
===============

Version 0.5.0 of Decibel is the first version that is released after moving 
the
code into the playground of the KDE repository.

This release is considered to be a feature complete implementation of the
Decibel daemon. It does:

 * Manage communication accounts for all supported protocols
 * Listen for incoming and outgoing communication channels
 * Start up components as configured to handle these channels
 * Support profiles of component configurations. This way you can eg. have
   different reactions to incoming communication channels when online or
   offline.
 * Create connections to contacts managed in an external PIM system.
 * Propagate presence state of contacts into an external PIM system.
 * Add support for logging of channels incl. open time, connect time and
   closing time.

If you have feature requests or want to report bugs, please send an email to
tobias dot hunger at basyskom dot de.

Version 0.5.0 includes an example implementation demonstrating how to 
integrate
Decibel with a desktop environment. This implementation uses simple INI files
for data storage.

This is the 5th milestone release of Decibel. It is addressed to application
developers wanting to get a glance at Decibel. We are very much interested
in your feedback (and - of course - contributions;-)!


Changes since Version 0.4.0
=============================

 * Make Decibel work with channels using the group interface.
 * Add infrastructure to log channels (so you can have list of
   incoming/outgoing calls, chat sessions, etc. and when those
   were held)
 * Add pkgconfig file for decibel client library.


Sources:
==========

Get the sources at http://decibel.kde.org/index.php?id=code

The code is further available in the KDE Subversion repository:
svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/pim/decibel

Please see the INSTALL file for instructions on how to build the sources and
the a list of dependencies.

If you have questions or comments, please send an email to
  tobias dot hunger at basyskom dot de

Thanks!

Binary packages are provided by some linux distributions already. See 
http://decibel.kde.org/index.php?id=code
for a list of links to these packages.


Known Problems
================

None.


To Do
======

 * Finalize KDE4 Controlcenter Module for account handling, add another module
   to configure components.
 * Integrate Decibel into desktop environments: A second example 
implementation
   showing how to integrate Decibel into KDE4 needs to be added.
 * Enhance existing command line examples with a GUI and write more examples.


Contact
=========

Web:          http://decibel.kde.org/
mailing list: decibel at kde dot org
IRC:          #decibel on freenode.net
Author:       tobias dot hunger at basyskom dot de
Authors Blog: http://basysblog.org/

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions, feedback or want to help
building the Decibel Realtime Communication Framework!

-- 

Tobias Hunger
Senior Software Engineer

basysKom GmbH
Robert-Bosch-Str. 7 | 64293 Darmstadt | Germany
Tel: +49 6151 3968769 | Fax: -9736 |
tobias.hunger@basyskom.de | www.basyskom.de

Handelsregister: Darmstadt HRB 9352
Geschaeftsfuehrung: Eva Brucherseifer
 
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