[JDEV] Time to develop a client ?

[Sebastiaan 'CBAS' Deckers]

> I am relatively new to Jabber and was wondering how much time it takes to
> develop a decent client with the minimal functionalities (with Jabbercom).

Decent client with minimal functionalities?
What's that? ;-)

Really, I think most of your time will go into the GUI, not the Jabber stuff
(especially if you're using JabberCOM).
It greatly depends on how skilled you are with the tools you're going to use
(JabberCOM, programming language, user interface design, etc.).
But if you're talking about a command line client based on JabberCOM, I'd
say an hour or so :-)

I've been working (alone) on a client for about three weeks now ... it's
written in JScript (DHTML for the GUI is great, and not as slow as I had
feared) and uses JabberCOM for the networking.
Most of the basic stuff (status, roster management and messaging) was done
in the first few days ... now I'm just spicing it up with a purtier
interface and a whole lot more features.

I don't have any previous experience as a software developer so I would also
like to know how the experienced among us are doing.

btw, before you start coding, read the docs ... especially the Client
Developer Cheat Sheet! (it's on Jabber.org, somewhere)
The JabberCOM documentation contains numerous mistakes. Instead, I used the
Microsoft OLE/COM Object Viewer (comes with the Platform SDK) to see what's
really going on.

Bye,
Sebastiaan