Tubes
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Data transfer via Telepathy
A tube is a Telepathy primitive for sending and receiving data, which can be to one person or to a group of people. Tubes can carry reliable byte streams or unreliable datagrams by analogy to TCP or UDP. When a tube is to a group, some different semantics may be more appropriate, since a shared stream is not coherent. It is up to the connection manager how tubes are implemented on top of its protocol.
There are two types of Tubes at present: D-Bus Tubes and Stream Tubes.
D-Bus Tubes provide D-Bus functionality to signal and call methods on everyone in the room.
Stream Tubes wrap TCP/IP sockets and are more suited to streaming data between two participants.
D-Bus Tubes
A multi-user tube is represented as a D-Bus bus, and the connection manager makes a mapping between the participants in the tube and D-Bus bus name. Clients can then take advantage of D-Bus's serialisation and the bindings so that they have to do less protocol work.
Stream Tubes
Stream Tubes allow you to establish TCP connections with contacts or participants in a multi-user chat or conference (MUC).
.---------.
|TP client|--|listening socket| B
'---------' ^
C |
.----------.
|Connection|
| Manager | A
'----------'
|
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/ \____
| \
\__ /
\ Internets /
/ \
/ \
| ___ /
\____/\ / \____/
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^
|
.----------.
|Connection|
F | Manager |-|listening socket| E
'----------' ^
|
.---------.
|TP client| D
'---------'
Guillaume Desmottes on Stream Tubes more more
See Low-level_Activity_API#Stream_Tubes for more documentation.
Tubes Channel Type
In terms of the Telepathy API, we have created a channel type which has methods for enumerating existing tubes and requesting new ones. The channel might be attached to an existing channel (such as a MUC), in which case it will be automatically closed when the underlying channel is closed.
Proposed Standards
See Telepathy#Proposed Standards for proto XEPs.