The idea

These are the facts: I like chatting with my friends so I made several profiles in several networks, but the fact is that the majority of people I met uses MSN protocol and Windowz. I use Linux and never thinked about using Microzoft MSN with Wine, I tried various opensource clients: it came out that the client which most fits my needs is aMSN.

http://amsn.sourceforge.net

BUT it has only a con: it’s slow, damn SLOW!!! And ugly unless you use Cameleon…so: base system is ok, great work, but gui has to be changed!!! Tcl/Tk is not the right choice to have a nice gui, so I thinked to rewrite ALL. It’s called reengineering.

I study Computer Science at University of Padua and a professor said to me: “Design is far more important than coding!!! You can’t write a program without prior find and write down his major features and design the structure!”. Maybe he is tedious, but he’s right. I will follow the rules of software engineering in my project. Moreover, testing units during coding, will assure higher quality.

The main phases of the software development cycle will be these:

requirement analysis
software design
computer programming
software testing

The technologies I will use are those that in my opinion are the fastest and powerful out there. Surely not the simplest to use.

As base language I believe I’ll choose C++ for its efficiency and object-oriented style. Why not Java? It’s a very good language and has nice newtorking features. But a JVM is still too slow on a Linux machine. Too RAM wasted. I’ll think on it.

As graphic libraries I strongly believe that QT is what we need. It’s multiplatform (Windows – open license now!, Linux, Mac). It’s VERY nice-looking and very customizable, especially from last version, 4.2: do you remember Winamp skins with strange shapes? You can do the same with QT!!! For those that are thinking: “Hey! But QT is written in C++! You can’t use Java within it!”, go here:

http://doc.trolltech.com/qtjambi-1.0/com/trolltech/qt/qtjambi-index.html

So, this project will take months if I run it with nobody other, my free time isn’t that much, but I hope in the power of the community! Let me know what do you think about it…