Instant Messaging Kit

The purpose of the Instant Messaging Kit (IM Kit for friends) is to provide a uniform way to access the various instant messaging networks that exist,
and to provide a connection between a People file and the accounts that person has.

The IM Kit is a modular framework developed to make it easy to access various IM networks (ICQ, AIM, Jabber, GoogleTalk, MSN, etc) and it's designed in a way it's fully integrated with Haiku and Zeta (BeOS R5/Bone are no longer supported, it may or may not work).
It makes use of attributes, indexes and live queries to make it as flexible as possible.

With the IM Kit you can, for instance, search for all members of your family that are online and that by using the standard Find interface.
You can also manage all the contacts using Tracker.

The IM Kit won't feature support for IRC, and we therefore recommend you to use Vision for that.

Mailing lists

The IM Kit project uses mailing list for development communication.

Getting dependencies

IM Kit needs some external dependencies:

  • OpenSSL (for MSN, GoogleTalk and OSCAR protocol add-ons)
  • libyahoo2 (for Yahoo protocol add-on)
  • InfoPopper (for im_infopopper client)

If some dependencies are missing, the component which needs them won't be built.

You can either build dependencies from source code by yourself or download precompiled binaries for your operating system.

Check out source code from SVN

svn checkout http://svn.osdrawer.net/imkit/trunk imkit

Build the source code

  • Check out IM Kit sources from SVN
  • Enter source code directory
  • Type the following commands:
./configure
jam -q

Install the binaries from a build

Once you successfully built the source code, type this command to install:

jam install

Create a .zip archive of your build

Once you successfully built the source code, type:

jam -q imkit

Helping out

You should start by reading our code style document to ensure any modifications you make follow our guidelines.
Then look at the open issues, find something interesting and tell to the development mailing list what issue you would like to work on.
Click here to go to the development mailing list page, to either subscribe or read the archive.

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