DMDircthe intelligent IRC client

With the upcoming version 0.6 of DMDirc (we know that it’s been a while since the last big release, we’ll blog about that soon) we have added support for even more operating systems.

As you probably know, DMDirc is written in Java which gives us a huge advantage as far as cross-platform compatibility is concerned. Java runs on all the major operating systems so most of the hard work has been done for us.

Up to DMDirc 0.5.6 we only supported Windows and Linux and provided a separate jar-only download for other platforms. For 0.6 the supported list of operating systems has more than doubled; we now package DMDirc for:

1. Linux
2. Windows
3. OS X
4. Open Solaris (and normal Solaris)
5. BSD (tested on PC-BSD, which is FreeBSD at the core)

This pretty much covers all major non-server operating systems, which we are quite pleased about.

The Installer for DMDirc runs on all of the above systems (apart from OS X, which has its own installation method) and where possible can download and install Java automatically. Currently the only exception to this is BSD, where users will need to compile the jdk16 port manually — unfortunately Sun’s licensing prevents redistribution of the modified JRE used on BSD.

The nightly builds have been working on all of the above operating systems for a while now, and you can browse and download the installers from our nightly builds page.

Ok, so you’ve read about actions and seen just how amazingly useful they are, maybe you’ve even used them and feel like donating your life savings to the creator? (It’s me, honest! Don’t believe Chris!) Well then, what happens when you come across something that you just can’t manage to do with actions? (It’s rare, but it happens — though if you believe it should be possible with actions let us know in #DMDirc on Quakenet and we’ll see what we can do). The answer is simple: Plugins :D

Plugins, unlike actions, are made from compiled Java code. This means that (also unlike actions) they require a considerable bit more technical knowledge to create.

The plugins system is tied into the actions system for most events, and whilst using this is not required, it is probably desirable for a lot of plugins.

Plugins can do a lot of things, from adding new action types, to manipulating the actual IRC Parser callbacks and line processing, in summary they give you the most control over the client, but at the cost of being harder to get to grips with.

Some plugins are available in source-form from the SVN repository for the project (and are compiled into the nightly jar files, so you can extract the .class files if you’re not comfortable compiling plugins yourself) and before 0.4 is released http://addons.dmdirc.com/ will be completed to allow plugins to be downloaded in source and/or compiled form.

Clicking on “more” will guide you through writing your first plugin. In further blog posts I will expand on this first plugin.
(more…)