Jaiku over GPRS stays active
Tonight I’ve been focusing on creating a Jabber IM client that will connect to Jaiku and receive live updates as and when they happen.
Development
I started off again by looking at the agsXMPP MiniClient code. This covers pretty much everything I was interested in achieving tonight, but I wanted to break it down to a bare-bones application that just showed me my communications with Jaiku and some debugging information.
This was great, and worked well to show me the many #testku messages I was sending. The screenshot on the right shows one of the test messages received.
Going wireless
I unplugged my phone from the computer and turned on the wireless LAN. Again, predictably, I could connect fine and it was pretty cool receiving updates from Jaiku as I walked around the house – yes, I’m that sad.
The problem here was that the moment I touch the power button on my phone, the wireless card turns off and the connection is lost, which definitely doesn’t help me. I had a sneaky feeling that GPRS might be slightly different, so I tried that instead.
Jaiku over GPRS
Like the other day, I had trouble again connecting to Jabber over GPRS. It seems to send a few packets and receive a few back, but then halt when trying to send any more. A handful of attempts later I was able to create a full connection.
GPRS was on, Jabber was connected, and Jaiku was slowly receiving messages. So I turned my phone off.
And turned it back on.
Amazing! I was truly impressed that the message I had sent from the PC while my phone was off was already waiting for me to see when I turned the phone back on. Not only was the connection re-established, but it had never been lost – implying that the Jabber connection was still receiving messages in the background even though the phone looked dead.
What does this mean?
In short, it means I can make a program which stays connected to the internet all day and receives updates about my contacts and their statuses. Jaiku for Windows Mobile could work even better than I thought.