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A Connection Manager is a factory for connections.
Connections represent active protocol sessions. There are a number of core interfaces which all connections should implement, and a number of optional interfaces which provide various functionality related to contacts and to the connection itself.
On protocols that support contact lists, these interface expose the user's contact lists, along with presence subscription information, contact list groups (if supported), and the ability to block and unblock contacts (if supported).
These optional Connection interfaces expose metadata about contacts on this connection—from their current presence through to the type of client they're connected with—and allow the local user to publish such metadata back to their contacts.
These optional Connection interfaces expose protocol-specific features, and allow configuring the running connection.
A Channel is used by Telepathy to exchange data between local applications and remote servers. A given connection will have many channels, each one represented by a D-Bus object.
Each Channel has a type, represented by a D-Bus interface, and may implement one or more additional interfaces from the list of channel interfaces below.
Each Channel implements one of the following types:
A Channel may also implement one or more of the following interfaces, depending on its type. Some interfaces are only applicable to particular channel types, while others may (in principle) appear on any type of channel.
These interfaces may only appear on channels of type
These interfaces are only applicable to channels of type
These interfaces provide functionality for ad-hoc conference calls and
chat rooms. They are primarily intended for
A set of objects to be used for authentication purposes, such as TLS certificates or handshakes for negotiating end-to-end security.
These interfaces are used when a
The Account Manager is a desktop service that provides account configuration and can manage the connection managers. In general, clients will use the account manager to find out about instant messaging accounts and their associated connections.
The Channel Dispatcher is a desktop service whose purpose is to dispatch incoming Telepathy Channels to the appropriate client (e.g. incoming text chat, file transfer, tubes, etc.).
Clients should implement one or more of these interfaces to be able to handle channels coming in from the Channel Dispatcher.