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Telepathy: Flexible Communications Framework
The Telepathy project is building a unified framework for many different kinds of real-time communications. It uses the D-Bus messaging system to provide a simple interface for client applications, allowing them to quickly take advantage of Telepathy's benefits.
Real-time: Telepathy supports instant messaging (both one-to-one and in groups), voice calls and video calls; it's less suited for store-and-forward applications like email
Unified: Many different programs can take advantage of these communications; Telepathy lets these programs work together
Framework: Telepathy allows the different aspects of communication handling to be divided between different parts of the system, meaning each part is simpler
At the core of Telepathy is the D-Bus interface specification which describes how Telepathy components communicate with each other. The current major version of the specification is version 0.17 (see DbusSpec for older versions). For a more approachable introduction to the structure of the framework, try the System Overview document. The Ubuntu spec for SIP/IM integration includes a good rationale for this distributed approach.
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Various Presentations about Telepathy have been made (including at LCA 2008).
Telepathy development is supported by Collabora Limited.
Learn more
Rationale: why Telepathy is the way it is
Setup: how to get various Telepathy components up and running
D-Bus interface specification, with older versions and spec format notes available from DbusSpec
File Formats: specification for Telepathy's file formats
Recipes: how to accomplish various tasks with the Telepathy API
Components: the parts of the Telepathy system
Tutorial: an introduction to Telepathy and D-Bus basics
For developers
The Telepathy Developer's Manual is still a work in progress, but already provides good introductions to many features useful to IM clients.
Discuss
IRC channel: #telepathy on irc.freenode.net
Contribute
Debugging: how to obtain information when things break
Style: style recommendations for Telepathy implementations
Release Checklist: thinks to do when making a release
Miscellany
Python Example is a very simple, unpractical example of doing things with Telepathy in Python
DTube Tutorial is a tutorial (and example) for doing one-to-one D-Tubes
Perl Example is a very simple, unpractical implementation of Python Example in Perl
Telepathy and other Projects: try to list integration of Telepathy in other projects
IPCF
Telepathy was originally known as IPCF (Inter-Personal Communication Framework). Thanks to David Malcolm for giving us a much cooler name.