Display Remote User Agent

One day, while looking for interesting stuff on addons.mozilla.org, one of our mentors stumbled upon a Thunderbird extension called “Display Mail User Agent”. He found the idea quite nice and decided to try it. He’s been using it ever since and keeps explicitly installing it when changing his user environment.

The Mozilla Display Mail User Agent Extension (notice the KMail icon in the middle on the right)

Quite naturally, excited by his new favourite Thunderbird plugin, he decided to suggest a GSoC project for an equivalent SIP Communicator feature. Just as with SMTP, most instant messaging protocols allow applications to sign outgoing messages for debugging, statistics, or publicity purposes. Right now SIP Communicator isn’t using this information, and there is not even a way for the User Interface to obtain this information from the protocol implementations (Protocol Providers).

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, would be to design a set of interfaces in our ProtocolProviderService that would allow other modules, such as the UI, to retrieve the name of the application that was used for sending a particular message. Next, you would have to implement these interfaces for all protocols where this is possible, and finally you would need to handle the graphical part of the plugin.

Basically, the idea is to make the chat window show the logo of the sending client, so you should be able to get something like this:

Provisional UI implementation of the SC DispMUA plugin (notice the GTalk icon in the top right corner)

So … you like it?

References:
The Mozilla Thunderbird “Display Mail User Agent” Extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/562

Other SIP Communicator GSoC 2008 Projects
http://www.sip-communicator.org/gsoc

SIP Communicator Developer Documentation
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Documentation/DeveloperDocumentation

The official SIP Communicator website
http://www.sip-communicator.org