Free communications software for linux

ACE short from ADAPTIVE Communication Environment is an object-oriented (OO) C++ framework that can help you develop and deploy high-performance software systems faster and better.
ACE is especially useful for systems that use network and/or inter-process communications and that take advantage of multithreading. While the ACE source code is free, thats not the only way you save money with ACE.
ACEs wrappers and higher-level patterns help you develop your software quickly and portably, helping you to complete your projects on time and within budget.
Over the past decade, my research group has worked with many collaborators on large-scale distributed application R&D projects in diverse domains, including command and control systems, telecom, datacom, medical engineering, distributed interactive simulations, and financial services.
Regardless of the domain and application requirements, weve found that software developers wrestle with the same core infrastructure challenges. Key challenges focus on OS platform portability, connection management and service initialization, event demultiplexing and event handler dispatching, multi-threading and synchronization, fault detection and fault tolerance, and various quality-of-service (QoS) issues, such as controlling latency, throughput, and jitter end-to-end.
Unfortunately, its very costly, time consuming, and error-prone for researchers and developers companies to independently rediscover and reinvent ad hoc solutions to these core distributed application software development challenges.
Fortunately, we have identified a relatively concise set of patterns and framework components that can be applied systematically to eliminate many tedious, error-prone, and non-portable aspects of developing and maintaining distributed applications.
A decade of intense R&D on these topics has yielded ACE, which is an object-oriented framework that implements many core patterns for concurrent communication software. We have applied the patterns and components in the ACE framework to develop The ACE ORB (TAO), which is our standards-based, CORBA middleware framework that allows clients to invoke operations on distributed objects without concern for object location, programming language, OS platform, communication protocols and interconnects, and hardware.
TAO is designed using the best software practices and patterns that we have discovered in our work on ACE in order to automate the delivery of high-performance and real-time QoS to distributed applications.
Enhancements:
- This release adds support for Intel C++ specific optimizations for Linux on IA64.
- It improves support for ACE_OS::fgetc, and adds support for other low-level I/O.
- Shared library builds on AIX now produce a libxxx.so file.
- A workaround has been added for a bugfix in GCC in Fedora Core 7.
- The footprint has been reduced on some platforms.
- Major improvements have been made to IPv6 support.
- TAO DDS enhancements have been added.
- There are assorted bugfixes and other minor enhancements.

OpenLaszlo is the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications.

OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for creating zero-install web applications with the user interface capabilities of desktop client software.

OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and soon DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.

OpenLaszlo is write once run everywhere. An OpenLaszlo application developed on one machine will run on all leading Web browsers on all leading desktop operating systems.

Cinematic user experience
Applications developed on OpenLaszlo provide a dramatically improved online user experience featuring advanced interfaces delivered on a single Web page. By bringing true application behavior to the Web, OpenLaszlo makes a new generation of online communications, commerce and content services viable for the first time.

imageRapid XML development approach
OpenLaszlo applications are written in LZX, a standards-driven XML and JavaScript description language that enables a declarative, text-based development process. LZX supports rapid prototyping, collaborative software development and long term code maintenance.

imageScalable deployment architecture
Depending on requirements, OpenLaszlo applications can be deployed either SOLO (Standalone OpenLaszlo Output) or from the OpenLaszlo Server. SOLO deployment supports most use cases and works from any HTTP Web server. OpenLaszlo Server deployment supports additional data integration options, persistent connections and run-time media transcoding. The OpenLaszlo server is Java-based and works with leading J2EE application servers and Java Servlet Containers. OpenLaszlos standards-based architecture delivers exceptional reliability and scalability, proven in deployments serving millions of users to date.

Benefits

Develop standards-based rich Internet Applications that support any web browser with a single code base in XML and JavaScript.

Deploy them from any HTTP Web server in SOLO mode, or from a J2EE application server or Java servlet container running the OpenLaszlo Server under Linux, UNIX, Windows or Mac OS X.

Display them in any Web browser enabled with the Flash 6 Player or above, reaching 96% of all Web-enabled desktops.

Ice, the Internet Communications Engine, is middleware for the practical programmer. A high-performance Internet communications platform, Ice includes a wealth of layered services and plug-ins. Ice means simplicity, speed, and power.
Ice is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Commercial licenses are available for customers who wish to use Ice with proprietary products. Please contact sales@zeroc.com for more information.
Ice is currently available for C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic, Python, and PHP, and is supported on various operating systems. Additional operating systems and languages will be supported in future releases.
Ice consists of the following packages:
Slice The Specification Language for Ice. Slice establishes a contract between clients and servers, and is also used to describe persistent data.
The Slice Compilers Tools to compile from Slice into target languages, such as C++ and Java, or to automatically generate documentation from Slice files.
Ice The Ice core library. Among many other features, the Ice core library manages all the communication tasks using a highly efficient protocol (including protocol compression and support for both TCP and UDP), provides a flexible thread pool for multi-threaded servers, and additional functionality that supports extreme scalability with potentially millions of Ice objects.
IceUtil A collection of utility functions, such as Unicode handling and thread programming. (C++ only.)
IceBox An application server specifically for Ice applications. IceBox can easily run and administer Ice services that are dynamically loaded as a DLL, shared library, or Java class.
IcePack A sophisticated server activation and deployment tool. With IcePack, the complex task of deploying applications in a heterogeneous computer network is dramatically simplified. Simply write a deployment descriptor in industry-standard XML, and IcePack handles the rest.
Freeze Freeze provides automatic persistence for Ice servants. With just a few lines of code, an application can incorporate a highly-scalable evictor that efficiently manages persistent objects.
FreezeScript It is common for persistent data types to change, especially in large software projects. In order to minimize the impact of these changes, FreezeScript provides inspection and migration tools for Freeze databases. The tools support an XML-based scripting capability that is both powerful and easy to use.
IceSSL A dynamic SSL transport plug-in for the Ice core. It provides authentication, encryption, and message integrity, using the industry-standard SSL protocol.
Glacier One of the most difficult challenges for object middleware systems is security and firewalls. Glacier, the firewall solution for Ice, greatly simplifies the deployment of secure applications. Glacier authenticates and filters client requests and allows callbacks to the client in a secure fashion. In combination with IceSSL, Glacier provides a powerful security solution that is both non-intrusive and easy to configure.
IceStorm A messaging service with support for federation. In contrast to most other messaging or event services, IceStorm supports typed events, meaning that broadcasting a message over a federation is as easy as invoking a method on an interface.
IcePatch A patching service for software distributions. Keeping software up-to-date is often a tedious task. IcePatch automates updating of individual files as well as complete directory hierarchies. Only files that have changed are downloaded to the client machine, using efficient compression algorithms.
Enhancements:
- Various additions, including redundant IceGrid registries.

Meldware Communication Suite is a platform independent groupware package consisting of:
Meldware Mail
Meldware Calendar
Meldware Webmail
Meldware Secure Administration System
Together the package provides support for thousands of users to concurrently send and receive email and schedule meetings. MCS uniquely allows you to store all messages and scheduling events in nearly any database and runs on nearly all popular software and hardware platforms.
Additionally, while the scheduling and calendaring services are able to be installed separately, the integrated featureset provides both a unique and powerful experience to both users and server-side Mail Based Applications and Collaboration Based Application Services.
The MCS platform provides security integration using LDAP sources including Microsoft Active Directory as well as flat-file and Database sources. Additionally, extensible security allows custom authentication/authorization sources.
Enhancements:
- IMAP is now stable with Mozilla Thunderbird and POP/SMTP are production ready.
- New Filestore code was implemented and many improvements were made in mailbox and storage code.

Buni Meldware Communication Suite (MCS) is a platform-independent groupware package consisting of:
- Meldware Mail
- Meldware Calendar
- Meldware Webmail
- Meldware Secure Administration System
Together the package provides support for thousands of users concurrently to send and receive email and to schedule meetings. MCS uniquely allows you to store all messages and scheduling events in nearly any database and runs on nearly all popular software and hardware platforms.
MCS commitment to platform and database agnosticism aims to meet increasing business requirements to maximize ease and flexibility of managing and accessing data as well as putting a premium on interoperability.
Additionally, while the scheduling and calendaring services can be installed separately, the integrated feature set provides both a distinctive and powerful experience to both users and server-side Mail Based Applications and Collaboration Based Application Services.
The MCS platform provides security integration using LDAP sources including Microsoft Active Directory as well as flat-file and database sources.
Additionally, extensible security allows custom authentication/authorization sources.
Enhancements:
- This is the first milestone release with WCAP, freebusy for webmail, and mature IMAP all together.
- It has undergone extensive hardening, dogfooding, and QA testing.
- The WCAP protocol for calendaring now works well for Thunderbird and Lightning 0.3.
- Webmail calendaring was greatly improved.
- The abillity to download attachments has been added to the webmail interface.
- Numerous performance improvements have been made in SMTP, IMAP, and MIME parsing since 1.0-M7.

PictoChat sniffer allows you to spy live on PictoChat communications between Nintendo DS gaming consoles.

Requires a 802.11 device with support for monitor mode and Radiotap (tested only under FreeBSD with the p54u driver). Based upon GTK2 and libpcap.

Eligante is software for archival, management and browsing (with full-text search functions) of all your communications, be it via email, chat (IRC, ICQ, MSN, etc.), or even messaging Web sites (hi5, orkut, etc.).
Messages are fetched from their original source and stored in a MySQL database. A Web interface allows you to search all data.
In this way, you can see all the conversations you had with someone, independently of where the conversation took place.
Enhancements:
- MS Windows support was added.
- An internal lightweight HTTP server was added for those who dont want to install Apache.
- SQLite support was added.

Walkietalkie is a program which allows full duplex voice communications over the internet. All both parties need is a PC or Mac and a microphone.
Walkietalkie is free to use and distribute. It just streams audio between points on the internet, there are no servers, so it cant be regulated or taken away.
Enhancements:
- AES encryption was added.
- A username can be use to make calls instead of an IP address.
- wt-locator server was added for locating users by name and working around firewall/router NAT.
- Something vaguely resembling a user guide was written.