Enlarge / Curling, like the cURL project, requires precision and is underappreciated.

When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project , it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL.

Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.

Here comes a new exciting Movim release. Two months after Cesco, here comes Catalina.

In this releases, many fixes but also some nice new features, both for the social and messaging sections of Movim.

New features

Global chatroom search

From the chatrooms widget, you can now directly search rooms globaly and join them in a click. This new feature relies on the search.jabber.network service, that is also implemented in Conversations and Gajim.

New design for the XMPP forms

The XMPP forms handling and display has been fully redesigned. With nice icons and proper labels it will now be simpler to configure Communities, chatrooms and other XMPP items.

Disable social features

Pod admins can now disable all the social features in one click in the admin panel. This is useful for those that only wants to use Movim as a chat frontend for their XMPP services.

Messages retractation

After ConverseJS Movim is the second XMPP client that implements the message retractation feature. This allow you to delete any published messages from the history. Be careful, this only works if the contact is also using a compatible client.

New night theme colors and design adjustments

Some small design adjustments were made to improve user experience. Some useless paddings were also removed to give more space to the content (like around the chat bubbles).

The night theme is now having darker, bluer colors, strongly inspired by the Aritim-Dark KDE/GTK theme.

Fixes and improvements

Beside those changes, many things were fixed in this release, regarding chatroom presences handling, notification counters or complex JID handling (especially if you're using transport services such as IRC or Telegram).

But the biggest internal change was to bring a new request type to the frontend. Now the current Movim UI (HTML + Javascript + CSS) can request the backend in 3 different ways regarding the usage.

1. Pure WebSocket requests: the request and the response are not linked together. This is the default case for the Movim requests.
2. Ajax requests to the daemon: this is useful when the UI needs to know if the message was handled by the server (useful when you publish articles or send chat messages) and if those messages needs to be processed by the daemon (to trigger XMPP requests for example)
3. And, since this version, some good ol' pure Ajax requests. They directly requests the HTTP backend, without even touching the daemon internaly. This is useful to load pieces of the UI and allows parallelisation. With this changes you'll see that parts of the UI (especially on the chat page) are now loaded way faster, without disturbing the daemon.

What's next?

In the upcoming weeks we're planning to do some maintenance on the XMPP services. Add some new features and do some administration. On Movim side, nothing really planned for now.

That's all folks!

#movim #ajax #http #release #xmpp