Happy 5 birthday, Tkabber!

Submitted by badlop on Tue, 07/03/2007 - 10:02

The first version of Tkabber was uploaded to jabber.ru CVS on 3 July 2002. So, today Tkabber turns 5 years old.

Happy birthday, Tkabber!

To commemorate the birthday, let's take a look at Tkabber history.

Graphic comparison: Then & Now

Tkabber in July 2002. This is SVN revision 10:

Tkabber now, in 2007:

First Tkabber website hosted in JabberStudio, used since March 2003 until December 2003:

And the website in 2007, hosted by Jabber.ru, used since January 2004:

Tkabber logo in 2002 (used since the beginning until 0.9.9) and in 2007 (used since 0.10.0):

Some events in Tkabber history

3 July 2002: Alexey Shchepin commits the first version of Tkabber to jabber.ru CVS
7 November 2002: New Tkabber mailing list in jabber.ru
8 November 2002: Tkabber is mentioned in the first Jabber Journal
13 November 2002: Tkabber is first mentioned on the JDEV mailing list (archived email)
26 December 2002: Tkabber package in Debian
21 March 2003: Tkabber is added to JabberStudio (announcement)
January 2004: New Drupal website
13 October 2004: Alexey Schchepin wins an Honorable Mention for Tkabber on ASPN Coolest Tk Screenshot Contest 2004
June 2006: New Tkabber Wiki
16th August, 2006: New Tkabber Subversion repository: migrated from JabberStudio CVS to XMPP.ru SVN. Sergei Golovan gets commit access to SVN
June 2007: New Tkabber Contributions Subversion repository

Jabber clients alive then & now

On 2002 there were a lot of Jabber clients, currently there are hundreds. Which clients from July 2002 are still alive today?

If you look at the old JabberCentral client list and check webpages of those clients, only 5 of them seem still alive.

Psi version 0.8.6 was released on July 2002
Coccinella added support for Jabber on Whiteboard-0.93, published on January 2002. See Roots of Coccinella.
GAIM (now Pidgin) added support for Jabber on GAIM 0.11.0-pre4, published on January 2001
myJabber proprietary Windows client
Tipic IM proprietary Windows client

Interview with Aleksey

There is an Interview to Alexey Shchepin from February 2005 that provides some information about Tkabber early days. Here are some excerpts:

[quote=Alexey Shchepin]I started Tkabber because I didn't find Linux client with two features: Unicode and conference support. Gabber had bad Unicode support, and Psi had no conference support. And I didn't want to improve them, because I dislike C++. So I started my own client in a more suitable language from my point of view.[/quote]

What public do you target with Tkabber?

Primarily myself.

How much time did you work in Tkabber before releasing the first version on JabberStudio or CVS?

Around one month.

What development environment do you use to code Tkabber? And for debugging?

Only XEmacs. For debugging I usually use printf/puts/io:format/etc. :)

What client did you use until Tkabber was mature enought?

Gabber. On Windows machines I used Exodus. As you can see, these clients made biggest influence on developing of Tkabber interface.

Did you know Sergei Golovan (big contributor) or Anastasia Gornostaeva (jabber.ru hosting and administration) before starting the project?

I knew Anastasia from talks@conference.jabber.ru chatroom, but I don't remember if Sergei was in this room before I started Tkabber. But I remember that he started to contribute to Tkabber about one month after I started to develop it :)