History of QuickDC
Rise
QuickDC is an open source Direct Connect compatible file sharing application for Linux and other Unix like operating systems. The project was founded by Jan Vidar Krey in late 2001.
Stefan Görling, the creator of javaDC project, had already managed to reverse engineer Direct Connect protocol and it's protection mechanism (the "$Lock").
Not long after, a handful of open source projects came to life; DCTC, DC++, Valknut and QuickDC.
QuickDC was at that time written in C++ using the Qt library extensively, and featured a nice user interface that supported multiple hubs. In 2002, QuickDC became a native KDE application which made the whole experience much more colorful and integrated. Here are some screenshots below:
In 2003, I proposed a new new protocol draft called DCTNG which I was hoping would convince the Open Source DC community to dump the flawed DC protocol. Even at that point the Neo-Modus original client was obsoleted and made irrelevant mostly due to the progress of the DC++ client.
DCTNG spurred quite a lot of attention among developers, a mailing list was set up, and later came ADC which were to supersede it (and that was a good thing :-). ADC has it's strong points; security (encrypted passwords, SSL/TLS), stealthiness, file hashing, is extensible by design, and is easy to implement from a developer's perspective.
Fall
In early 2004, the QuickDC project was declared dead. Mainly due to the lack of time and motivation to work on it.
Resurrection
In mid-2005 the project was started up again, this time as a complete and utter rewrite/redesign. QuickDC is still not publicly released, here is it's current feature set:
- Multiprotocol (Extended NMDC, ADC 0.11 (client and hub), HTTP 1.1 (client and server))
- Multisource downloads with File hashing (TTH)
- Multiplatform (Linux, FreeBSD, OSX, Solaris, Windows)
- Multiarchitecture (i386, AMD64, PowerPC, Sparc)
There are no dependencies on Qt or KDE, although a Qt or KDE front-end is very likely to come. Development is done in parallel on Linux, FreeBSD and MacOSX. A windows port is in the works, but not yet completed.
Join the QuickDC hub. It is hosted on QuickDC, which probably makes it the first combined ADC client and hub.
