[moxie]

Try using libtextsecure instead of interacting with websockets directly. We publish artifacts, and while the API might change over time, if you stick with a versioned artifact you'll be good. http://open-whisper-systems.readme.io/v1.0/docs/textsecure-j...

We have a few bots in production that use libtextsecure and have been running fine for almost a year without any maintenance.

[dmix]

Last year I wanted to help out with the TextSecure browser (chrome extension) project and had a similar experience as the OP.

I was a bit at loss about where to begin, as I couldn't find documentation about getting the extension setup for dev/testing. Specifically I couldn't get past the QR-code auth screen as I seemed to be missing some special configuration to connect with the servers.

I just assumed it wasn't really ready for outside devs yet.

But I just checked back in on the repo and it looks like a new CONTRIBUTING doc has been added, which is great: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Browser/blob/ma... This is the type of stuff I was looking for.

I'm happy to see WhisperSystems making contributing more accessible. I probably could have learned this stuff by asking the devs, but I didn't want to bother them, I much prefer reading docs and playing with it myself first.

[gioi]

Thank you for your answer and for your time.

My language of choice for the bot was Clojure. I was interfacing with libaxolotl-java and basically rebuilding libtextsecure in Clojure (that was months ago).

Yesterday, when I discovered libtextsecure-java (while exploring Github repositories, by the way, I didn't notice your website had been updated in the meantime), I started a rewrite, using README as my primary source of documentation (the only piece of doc I could find, actually).

Ok, so what's this `KeyHelper`? Ok, I'll search on Github. Fine, it's actually `org.whispersystems.libaxolotl.util.KeyHelper` - luckily I knew it was in a completely different project. The same goes for `AxolotlStore`, which is actually `org.whispersystems.libaxolotl.state.AxolotlStore`, and it's not even mentioned on libaxolotl-java README because the latter is outdated.

Then: what is `TrustStore`? Good luck finding out that! Basically it is a wrapper around a binary file - which I had to download from TextSecure source repo without knowing what there was inside, and which by the way is encrypted with the password whisper (documentation: nowhere - thank you @AsamK for your textsecure-cli sources on github).

Ok, and finally figuring out - turning to TextSecure-Server docs - what is a signaling key, what are the specifics for the client-generated password (which by the way is sent over SSL via Basic authentication - probably not the most secure method ever, but probably there are many reason for that) and what is an install ID, I finally had the opportunity to debug obscure security problems on Java and to meet in person a Fedora bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1167153). Not to mention the fact that apparently libtextsecure-java doesn't work over websockets but only over GCM (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/libtextsecure-java/pull/5) - however I won't be surprised if it did.

A really nightmarish experience. Maybe this summer I'll try to reimplement libtextsecure in another language and then document thoroughly my efforts. Who knows.

[jumperjake]

Any chance of providing an api that is more friendly to be used from other languages? Java is not the easiest thing to work with.

Also, does this library work on other systems besides android? I've noticed `android` appearing multiple places and google specific api (`GoogleCloudMessaging`).