zap!
For the past few months I've been busily coding away on zap!, an open-source stand-alone Mozilla-based
SIP client project sponsored by 8x8.
SIP, the IETF's session initiation protocol, is a protocol for establishing peer-to-peer media sessions (voice, video, chat, ...) and is used by many VoIP networks, such as Packet8 or Free World Dialup (not Skype though).
Currently zap! has support for Voice (Speex and G.711 codecs) and simple messaging.
Last week zap! got its first big outing when I took it to the SIPit interop event in Stockholm, Sweden. These interop events are being held twice a year and allow implementors to test the compatibility of their SIP implementations and play through some more 'exotic' scenarios, such as forking calls where multiple answers are being received for a single call.
On the whole I was very pleased with how zap! was holding up in testing. A few bugs still need sorting out, and then, if everything goes to plan, I will release builds for version 0.1 later this week.
Posted by
alex at
11:39
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Comments (4)
zap sounds very promising. I hope it will integrate all the lessons learned by all the other IM and VoIP programs (Google talk, GAIM, VoiceBuster, etc.)
"if everything goes to plan, I will release builds for version 0.1 later this week."
Sooo, got a new ETA? ;-)
> I hope it will integrate all the lessons learned by all the other IM and VoIP programs (Google talk, GAIM, VoiceBuster, etc.)
What particular lessons were you thinking of?
> Sooo, got a new ETA? ;-)
I know, I know :-) Looks like it's going to be another couple of days or so.
I was wondering whether you have any plans to embed this client in the Mozilla Firefox browser. This will differentiate this project from other VOIP clients being developed in the open source community.
> I was wondering whether you have any plans to embed this client in the Mozilla Firefox browser.
The short answer is no. The zap client is and will remain a stand-alone app, but there is a project that uses the zap SIP stack library to add VoIP/messaging functionality to Thunderbird. See http://cockatoo.mozdev.org.