My team and I are struggling to put together a notification software to incorporate onto our site, so that users who have added our bot on their IM client (eg. MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger) would be able to get alerted when something relevant is relating to them. We’d also need to be able to check to see what their status is (online, offline, busy).
Do you know if this could be done with straight PHP, or what other language would need to come into play to make something like this possible?
I read an article years ago about MSN and Y! messenger. From what i can remember Y! either sends and receives everything encrypted or as hex which makes it difficult to communicate with client clones. A quick google will probably find you more on that protocol. MSN iirc uses plaintext / XML so you should be able to communicate with it by opening up a socket connection to the server. It’s been about 5 years since i looked into MSN cloning but i remember researching a lot so i could use a delphi project of mine to communicate via msn.