Projects/Decibel

About Decibel

Decibel: Unified Communication Inteface

Overview

Decibel is implemented in a desktop wide server process, offering services via DBus. This daemon process is desktop agnostic and uses desktop dependent components (e.g. GUIs) to integrate into the users preferred desktop environment. Components are configured to be started in response to communication events. This saves resources and allows for users work with those components that work best for them.

Decibel uses telepathy compatible protocol implementations to connect to realtime communication servers. By using this open source standard, Decibel supports a wide range of communication protocols.

Decibel software stack

   The Decibel software stack

Services offered

The Decibel daemon offers the following services:

(Communication) account management The desktop user is able to manage all his communication accounts in Decibel, using a common interface for all settings on all supported communication protocols. Decibel will make sure, that configured accounts are brought online and offline as configured.
Protocol configuration management Preferred telepathy connection managers can get configured in Decibel, eleminating the need for applications to store these settings.
Contact management Decibel can get contact information from the desktops PIM database and use this information to connect to any contact. It stores and updates presence information on contacts in the PIM database.
Component management Decibel will start up desktop specific components in response to communication events like new communication channels opening as configured by the user.

These services dramatically reduce the complexity and effort required to integrate realtime communication into applications, enableing even "normal" desktop applications to offer realtime communication based services to their users. We hope that this ease of use will make application developers think about new uses of these communication methods, enableing users to interact with each other within the application they are currently working in.