Using telepathy-glib in python through gobject-introspection

Until now, you had two options for writing telepathy clients in python: use the low level D-Bus API through dbus-python, or using telepathy-python which provided very little more for clients apart from registering the zillion of constants in Telepathy.

Telepathy-glib is a library that provides a higher level API for interacting with the Telepathy framework than the low level D-Bus API. No languages bindings exist currently for this library so only C apps such as Empathy used it, developers using languages such as Python and JavaScript were stuck with the D-Bus API and generally each app invented a more or less complete new API on top of it.

In parallel to a push for adding more high-level APIs to telepathy-glib, we are looking at what remains to be done in the gobject-introspection stack so we don't need to write static bindings for each language. After some weeks hacking on Gjs (Danielle Madeley), Vala (Travis Reitter) and PyGI (me) things are starting to take shape.

Following Danni's post on her progress, here comes an example observer written in Python and using PyGI to call telepathy-glib:

import gobject
gobject.threads_init()

from gi.repository import TelepathyGLib

#TelepathyGLib.debug_set_flags('all')

def observe_channels(observer, account, connection, channels,
                     dispatch_op, requests, context, user_data):
    print 'observe_channels'

    print 'account = %s' % account.get_object_path()
    print 'connection = %s' % connection.get_object_path()

    for channel in channels:
        print 'channel = %s' % channel.get_object_path()

    if dispatch_op is not None:
      print 'dispatch_op = %s' % dispatch_op.get_object_path()
    else:
      print 'dispatch_op = None'

    if requests is not None:
        for request in requests:
          print 'request = %s' % request.get_object_path()

    context.accept()

dbus = TelepathyGLib.DBusDaemon.dup()
observer = TelepathyGLib.SimpleObserver.new(dbus, True, 'PythonObserver', True,
                                            observe_channels, None)
observer.add_observer_filter({
  TelepathyGLib.PROP_CHANNEL_CHANNEL_TYPE: TelepathyGLib.IFACE_CHANNEL_TYPE_TEXT,
})

observer.register()

main_loop = gobject.MainLoop()
main_loop.run()

This needs the latest code in telepathy-glib, gobject-introspection and pygi, and also a patch to PyGI that hasn't been release yet.