shtoom.txt

=== Shtoom ===

 Vercotti: (Michael Palin) Well, I had been running a successful escort agency - high class, no really, high class girls... we didn't have any of that. That was right out. And I decided. (phone rings on desk) Excuse me. (he answers it) Hello... no, not now... shtoom... shtoom... right... yes we'll have the watch ready for you at midnight... the watch... the Chinese watch... yes, right oh, bye bye... Mother.
-- Ethel the Frog


Shtoom is a open-source, cross-platform VoIP softphone, implemented in Python. As well as the basic phone, the package also includes a number of other applications -

    * shtoomphone - the end-user phone
    * doug - a framework for writing server-side voip applications.

There's a number of applications implemented using doug that ship with shtoom.

    * shtam - a simple answering machine/voicemail application
    * shmessage - an announcement server
    * shtoomcu - a simple conferencing server

Shtoom works on Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OS X. The phone has a number of user interfaces - Qt/KDE, Gtk/GNOME, wxWidgets, Cocoa (OS X), Tk and a command line.

The phone has audio support on Linux using OSS or ALSA, on OS X using native CoreAudio, and on all other platforms using the PortAudio library. A native sound drivers for Windows has been implemented as part of Pythonwin, and needs to be hooked up.

Shtoom requires Python 2.3 or later, and Twisted 1.3 or later.

= Availability =

Shtoom 0.2 is the last 'release'. It's very old now, and a new release should be soon. Really. You can still get 0.2 from the Sourceforge Files page.

You really want to be using the current version, available via subversion. You can fetch the code from svn://divmod.org/svn/Shtoom/trunk/shtoom.

A 0.3 release is not too far in the future. This includes a vast number of new features over the last (0.2 release) including:

    * Greatly improved NAT/firewall traversal, using either STUN or Universal Plug'n'Play (UPnP)
    * Address book support
    * Native ALSA audio support
    * Speex codec support
    * Native OS X user interface and audio
    * DTMF detection and generation
    * Doug, the shtoom application framework
    * Outbound proxy support
    * A wxWidgets user interface
    * Completely rewritten Gnome and Qt user interfaces
    * A large amount of refactoring to make the code more sane

= Participate =

There's a #shtoom channel on irc.freenode.net, and a mailing list for shtoom - shtoom@python.org. The mailing list is quite low volume.

= Release history =

    * Release 0.3
      Real Soon Now.
    * Release 0.2
      22nd March 2004

      Registration. Much more of SIP is supported. Preferences GUI. Lots of other stuff.
      Tested against FWD, Divmod Quotient, and a host of other clients (including kphone, linphone and xten)
    * Release 0.1
      1st November 2003

      First release. Very basic call functionality, but this release really isn't usable. If you must have this, it's available from this project's Sourceforge Files page.

= License =

Shtoom is (C) Copyright 2004 Anthony Baxter, and is made available under the GNU LGPL.