Dragontalk

. . . talking with the (mozilla) dragon

The Dragontalk project provides a set of extensions for the ​Mozilla products ​Thunderbird (email client) and ​Firefox (web browser).

One of the goals was to get information about the user's operations. For instance, if the user sends or replies to an email, Dragontalk sends a SendEmail or a ReplyToEmail event to some TCP port on localhost where an XMLRPC listener can catch it. For the browser plugin, notifications are sent when browsing the web. In concert with other programs that implement the listener part, we use this to elicit the user's context - see the ​User Context project. Of course the user can disable the plugins at any time.

Apart from these event notification plugins, there are Thunderbird plugins that provide other functionality such as mail classification and quick opening of folders using autocompletion.

The Dragontalk extensions were developed in the ​EPOS project and are used in the ​Mymory project, too.

The extensions

Useful without any external program

• DragonTalk QuickOpen extension for Thunderbird - open folders with autocomplete functionality
• WebReview extension for Firefox - find visited sites in your history faster and easier

Interacting with external programs

• Event notification - sent information about user actions to an external application
  • User observation for Thunderbird
  • User observation for Firefox
• Mail classification for Thunderbird - helps moving mails to their appropriate folder using an external classification engine
• Tagging extension for Thunderbird - used with ​NEPOMUK and previously ​gnowsis.
• gnowsis plugin for TB and FF providing a bunch of features (link/browse resource, open mail by id, etc.) for use with ​gnowsis.

Developer documentation

• DeveloperDocumentation - how to debug plugins using Venkman

Mailing list

We use the usercontext mailing list (​usercontext@lists.opendfki.de) to discuss dragontalk issues, too. You can subscribe and unsubscribe here: ​http://lists.opendfki.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/usercontext

The sources…

... can be checked out using SVN:

https://dragontalk.opendfki.de/repos/trunk/