After a pretty long hiatus due to moving house and generally being too tired to make much progress, I've started working on OpenFire again properly. So far, I've finished the main features I had planned for the core library - raw message listener interface, conversation specific listener interface, friend specific listener interface, and exposing what games people are playing. I'll be reviewing the overall situation this week, to see what other features the core library desperately needs, then move on to implementing the features I've been wanting for the message relay.

I often find it difficult to sustain hobby projects like this, once the initial interesting technical barriers are out of the way (in the case of OpenFire, reverse engineering the XFire protocol). Once v1 was out, the framework was in place to be able to do pretty much anything with XFire, but it was the framework that I found most interesting. However, over the past few months I've realised that there is still a great deal that can be achieved with OpenFire, especially when it comes to writing web applications that interact with users through XFire. Stats recording, leader boards, you name it - with a decent library to get access to the information broadcast from XFire, many things become possible.

This is the main reason why I have decided to start hacking away at OpenFire again. I have the motivation to see this thing through to the end. I look forward to writing more here about future progress and project ideas.