tcp.im!

Heads-up, some time in the next few hours (Murphy-willing) we're going to release tcp.im, which allows Radio and Frontier to be an instant messaging client or server (either can be either). It was a collaboration between Eric Soroos, Jeremy Bowers and myself; with Jake Savin doing the close. There may be some bugs and more docs to write over the next few days. Should be final on Monday.

Excellent.

tcp.im essentially exposes a reasonable amount of the intersection of the capabilities of AIM and Jabber, with an eye towards easily incorporating anything else that wants to play. So in technical terms, the framework is not necessarily terribly capable. But because of the cross-IM-platform nature of the code, it's gonna have a lot of juice.

I did some research on the web a while ago; as far as I know, tcp.im is (currently) unique. There is no library available that tries to flatten the differences amongst the various IM networks, to make it easy to write tools that works with all of them. (I may be wrong, of course.)

Underneath tcp.im, there are capable drivers for both AIM and Jabber. Att DJ Adams and Jabber crew, with this release, everybody will have Jabber drivers in their Radio Userland installs. You can look at the Jabber driver documentation now, if you like.

There's a lot of fun to be had, both with the tcp.im framework, and working directly with AIM and Jabber. Let's rock!

As a final note, this officially terminates any usefulness TextResponder may have had. You're not likely to care, but in some abstract way, it should be mentioned here as a form of closure.