Let's make them jump through some hoops first!

Dear developers of the Smack API,

Here’s a little ‘experience report’ from someone new to xmpp trying to use your library…

I downloaded v3.1.0 and got to work with a simple example :

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    try {
        XMPPConnection connection = new XMPPConnection("example.com");
        connection.login("name", "login");
        Message message = new Message();
        message.setTo("name@example.com");
        message.setSubject("subject");
        message.setBody("body");
        message.setType(Message.Type.headline);
        connection.sendPacket(message);
        connection.disconnect();
    } catch (Throwable t) {
        System.err.println(t);
    }
}

I was greeted with a NPE. Judging from the stack trace messages, I can only assume I ran into the issue reported in :

This issue was reported against the BETA for v3.1.0. and was reported 16 months ago. I find it strange that such a crucial issue found its way into the final release of v3.1.0 despite the report. In any case, the fix for it has been in the repository for 5+ months.

No biggie, I’ll just download a nightly build and use that one for my experiments!

Unfortunately, the special page you have set up for nightly builds

http://www.igniterealtime.org/downloads/nightly_smack.jsp

does not contain the nightly build, it’s empty

I could grab the sources and see if I can get it to build myself. I’m not a subversion user, so first I’d have to install a Subversion plugin for Eclipse and struggle with it to get the sources from the repository. Then, hopefully building the .jars will just work.

But before I jump through these hoops, I’ll first have a look around to see if there are any other xmpp libraries for java that I can start using right away.

After spending so much time & effort on creating what looks like a great library, I don’t understand why newcomers are greeted with such a bad first impression.

Anyway, I hope a patch is released soon (or the nightly builds page is fixed), I’d really like to start using your library.

I don’t think threatening to use a different library will help. My experiences with Smack as a library are generally very good. The project could use a new release with some high profile bugs out of the way. But there is quite some activity in the svn repository which will hopefully lead to a new release.

I share your fustrations. I also searched around and couldn’t find any other options. I’ve attached the jars I just built. Hope it helps.
smack.zip (2256276 Bytes)