Javecho - Should I fork EchoLink? · Aug 20, 01:17 PM by Gregg Wonderly
I’ve put some effort into Javecho, my Java version of the echolink client. I still have quite a bit of work to do, to finish out the sysop mode. There are several other things that I want to do to make echolink have a few more capabilities. There is some unfinished code in Javecho that is intended to allow you to use a web camera, and then send pictures from that camera to the people that you are talking to. Whenever you are transmitting, your latest image would be periodically sent out to users who have sent your station a “I want your picture” message.
There is also the whole follow me web browsing business where a set of users can have a conversation about the web, and when the transmitting station clicks a link, everyone makes that page change together. This makes it possible to do a tutorial or teaching excercise on the web with echolink as your audio (and with the web cam, visual) mechanism.
There is also the whole business about having multiple stations behind a firewall or NAT based routing environment. If we changed the audio stream, to include a destination callsign string, or a magic cookie that we include for each station behind the same IP address, then we could place a single proxy service on the local network that all echolink inbound data went to, and the local stations would connect to that proxy to receive their audio over TCP. The end result would allow a repeater and a user station to be behind the same firewall/router.
There are some other, things that I’ve tossed around, but I don’t have enough of it thought out to discuss yet. If you are interested in these kinds of features, you might lobby echolink powers-that-be for a new version of the protocol that includes better support for station to station custom features, and a new audio stream format that includes an extra id byte that can be provided by a station to the registration server which would allow the users wanting to connect to you to get to the right station behind your fire wall. A single byte of extra data, on the end of the audio packet, could be interepreted by new code, and ignored by the old, perhaps. We’d need to check with all the authors about whether the extra routing byte would be harmful.
Anyway, if you have thoughts about these issues, or others related to echolink or Javecho, please feel free to leave them here.
