Re: [xPG] New Member

[<in...@fa...>]

Hi Michael,

welcome to the list!

First off, let me say that xPG does not have fixed goals or something
like that.  Its more of a collaboration, code- and idea-sharing
between people building cryptographic user-level (be that GUI or
server-side) applications in Java utilizing OpenPGP.  Thats a very
broad agenda but its probably specific enough to differentiate
ourselves from other groups.  In short: xPG is what you make of it.
This is something of a change from our original agenda (which was
building a PGP replacement in Java) but more closely matches what the
developers currently involved are actually capable of doing while
still having fun.

That said, items currently being worked on are a low-level OpenPGP
implementation (me), some baseline GUI stuff (gulliver) and I also
have some iButton-based token supporting code lying around that I want
to generalize a bit to encompass all crypto-tokens and then integrate
it.  Someone else was also working on Smartcard stuff but he seems to
have vanished.

Looking at your experience, maybe you'd be interested in looking into
the J2ME stuff?  Then, again, maybe you'd like something else for a
change ;-)

On Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 08:50:17AM +0100, M. Jerger wrote:
> - What's the target plattform for the gui ?

Not really fixed but the library currently required JDK 1.3, so thats
what we got.

I have been investigating the possibility to build a low-level lib on
something like the BouncyCastle leight-weight (non-JCE) crypto library
for use with J2ME but didn't pursue that further because I didn't have
a J2ME development environment.  Since our pgp library does not make
many assumptions, it really should not be too hard but its mostly an
application issue anyway.  I also don't know how the cryptix
high-level (messaging) stuff fares with regard to JDK requirements,
maybe Edwin can enlighten us there.  This will be mostly be of
interest for the agent, I think and considering the limited
functionality for that area, we might make it a completely seperate
implementation and then look at what part of the implementation could
be shared afterwards.

Apart from that, it sort of went without saying that GUIs are intended
to run on most desktop systems (MacOS 9 will be tough) eventually and
that the agent (and thus the crypto-token support) should run on most
mobile systems.

> - How do you communicate the application designs ? (UML, maybe an
> specialized tool or file format) ?

Code ;-) Really, I did some screenshots a while back of how a GUI
could look like and we're mostly just going ahead with an ad-hoc
design, post patches and then let it be discussed.  If you want to use
UML, thats fine, but its not required IMHO.

Ingo