Tadas Dailyda blog

0.1 release of obex-data-server and minor API changes

obex-data-server 0.1 released: http://tadas.dailyda.com/software/obex-data-server-0.1.tar.gz.

This is first official release of obex-data-server. obex-data-server is D-Bus service providing high-level OBEX client and server side functionality (currently supports OPP and FTP profiles and Bluetooth transport).

Bug tracker: http://bugs.muiline.com (choose “obex-data-server” project)
API documentation: http://svn.muiline.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/obex-data-server/trunk/dbus-api.txt

Minor API changes which happened just before 0.1 release:
1) uint64 is used for file sizes.
Affected methods/signals:

Session.GetTransferInfo();
Session.TransferStarted();
Session.TransferProgress();
ServerSession.GetTransferInfo();
ServerSession.TransferStarted();
ServerSession.TransferProgress().

2) OBJECT_PATH (”o”) D-Bus type is used for object paths (previously, STRING was used).
Affected methods/signals:

Manager.CreateBluetoothSession();
Manager.CreateBluetoothServer();
Manager.GetSessionInfo();
Manager.GetServerInfo();
Manager.SessionCreated();
Manager.SessionRemoved();
Server.GetServerSessionInfo();
Server.SessionCreated();
Server.SessionRemoved();

Special thanks to:
Marcel Holtmann
Johan Hedberg
Manuel Naranjo
Bastien Nocera

State of obex-data-server

For some time there hasn’t been any news on obex-data-server front, but that’s because I am busy with my studies. I really hope to make first public release of obex-data-server until next year. For that to happen I need to fix at least 3 bad bugs and create some website with documentation. Currently known bugs can be found at http://bugs.muiline.com (select “obex-data-server” from project list).

bluetooth-sendto

So I’m continuing development of obex-data-server. Now that it’s pretty much finished and the D-Bus API shouldn’t change anymore, I can start doing some apps that actually use it.

First such app is bluetooth-sendto which is gonna be part of bluez-gnome. It’s a Object Push client which can be used to send one or more files to another Bluetooth device. I’m glad that I could reuse some older code from gnome-bluetooth for this application, hence it’s feature-complete already.

And now for some screenies:

sending file with bluetooth sendto

sending several files, file is rejected by remote device

Now I’m not so sure when one could expect this app to show up in official bluez-gnome package, but I’m working on getting obex-data-server for it’s first public release and only then it might be the time.

My SoC project

First of all sorry for not posting SoC project reports in blog. This was because either I didn’t find time to do that or I didn’t think it would be interesting to read. Now that there is something to show I might actually do so..

My SoC project was called “gnome-bluetooth and bluez-gnome improvements and unification”. Now the original plan was to improve GNOME Bluetooth stack but the actual result is a total rewrite.

My main goal during summer was to implement obex-data-server which is a DBus service providing easy to use API for using OBEX protocol (both client and server wise). Current implementation supports OPP (Object Push Profile) and FTP (File Transfer Profile). This means that you can have FTP server running on your Bluetooth adapter with several lines of python, you can also do all client operations without having to use openobex directly or knowing any of low-level OBEX stuff.

obex-data-server is written in glibish C and uses dbus-glib bindings. You can acquire it’s code from here (svn) or browse here. No releases yet, since I have to finish it up properly.

obex-data-server effectively deprecates libbtctl and gnome-bluetooth. All of gnome-bluetooth functionality will be provided in bluez-gnome very soon.

gnome-obex-send will be replaced by bluez-sendto which I’m currently working on. Of course, it will use obex-data-server DBus api and will be somewhat more complete. I will also implement “File sharing” tab in bluez applet where you will be able to easily enable FTP and OPP OBEX servers. I will probably also rewrite gnome-vfs-obexftp to use obex-data-server and gvfs some time in the near future.

And now for some visual material I did a screencast showcasing obex-data-server. You can see how few lines of python are needed to launch OBEX servers by checking out ods-server-test.py.

obex-data-server screencast (OGG)