Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Update - Refactoring Bittorrent for Firefox

Just a small update.

So, what's the state of the Bittorrent for Firefox extension? The last released version works, is fine for use on smaller torrents but needs thorough debugging to find some leaks that become quite bad on larger torrents.

So, what am I doing? Well, I've been caught up in the academic year; I've been tutoring, and will be lecturing in a few weeks. It's taken time away from some research (particularly some experiments) I'm doing using P2P for content delivery. Ooh! Fancy! Disregarding that, I've been refactoring the existing code so that components can be used independently of one another as complete XPCOM components. A previous post provided a Bencoding component for encoding/decoding data structures, and more recently I've been refactoring the Bittorrent Tracker client code. It's painfully slow, but should be nice. If you can see yourself using bittorrent XPCOM components, I'd love to hear the interface you'd like.

So, what to look forward to? The code for shutdown of torrent has been corrected, and will be released on request or once refactoring complete. If anyone wants to build a different Bittorrent client, they can look forward to using the refactored and separated components. In the future, I'd like to see the downloads appear in the Download Manager, instead of in the current version's Tools > Torrents menu (this way I can piggy-back on the status bar download progress without taking up more space, and it also makes managing torrents easier for the user), though if anyone else would like to write that, that'd be wonderful. ;-)

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