Hell Oh Entropy!

Philip had recently posted on libyahoo2-users that Yahoo is planning to open its instant messaging platform API to the public. It has been delayed a bit since then, but it is surely due.

So how does this change things for libyahoo2 or any other FOSS implementations? For one, the fun of digging through binary data and trying to make sense of it will be gone ;) But on a serious note, we can hope to have some more consistency in behaviour and support will definitely improve. I'm not very keen about the fact that the support will be over HTTP, but I guess it works well for them. For now we can only wait for their announcement before we know what the entire thing looks like. If it is anything like the messages that the current official yahoo! messengers send, then it's only really a wrapper around their old pain of a protocol. But this does not really use JSON, so it is likely that they're writing a fresh implementation. In any case, there is still time for it and in that time, we have some decent work going on on the libyahoo2 code base.

In other news, Kai Zhang has been working on implementing chat room support for libyahoo2 as his Fedora Summer Coding project. His code can be found here. Other than the brief comments in the git logs, everything seems to be quite ok. A bulk of the feature set is already in, so that is pretty good progress. Once the entire feature set is completed and tested, I will have them included in the main libyahoo2 source tree. Following that will be a release and a rebase on Fedora. This will be a good rebase compared to the ugly one the last time around, where I broke all API compatibility in an effort to revamp the authentication support.