Pidgin Query

[Jeff Sadowski]

Just to clarify and make sure we are talking of the same thing.
A Flash app that talks as a client to a server app that could be
running on the same machine as your webserver. Just a simple client
and let the server side do the integrating to libpurple. So you could
use a simple c program on the serverside that uses libpurple
and allows your client side(Flash or Javascript or java app) to
request things through it to connect with any protocol libpurple
supports. Yesterday when I was trying to figure out how to use shared
object libs in java I thought about why not use just C on the server
side. Ohh just a though if we get voice and video in libpurple Flash
supports that as well. I've only did clients in java which I could
easily turn into a java app but I'm sure there are other
possibilities. I'm kind of more anti flash than java because it
supports even less platforms.
java has jikes and gcj (supposedly sun released its source too but its
not quite what you think. You need java to compile it when I tried)
the open source flash just isn't working quite yet last I tried.

On 7/31/07, Stephen Eilert <spedrosa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/31/07, Jeff Sadowski <jeff.sadowski at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would think you would need to use something more along the lines of java.
> > Personally I don't like java but it sounds like you want objects on a web page
> > that talk with the server on the other end or talk directly to chat servers.
>
> You mean a Java applet then. However, that's not very different from a
> desktop application. Heck, you could even use Java Web Start and start
> the application by clicking a link.
>
> > PHP from what I understand you have to submit each time to the server
> > to do communications. I'm pretty sure gmail uses something with
> > javascript to refresh your mail every so often and has a scripting
> > language like php to update your page. Its not instant.
>
> GMail does that with Javascript, more precisely with what is now
> called "AJAX", or rather, XMLHttpRequest. The choice of server
> language is quite irrelevant.
>
> You would have to keep updating with the applet too, unless you are
> keeping a connection open with your own protocol. By that point, it is
> not a web application anymore.
>
> > Javascript
> > itself might be another possibility but it would require a lot of code
> > to be downloaded each time. Even with a complete java client you would
> > be downloading the full app each time. To have something slimmer to
> > download from the page you could have a java servlet (which could use
> > libpurple) running on the server and a java applet that talks to the
> > java servlet.
>
> There's also Flash. The download might be shorter, but the Java VM is
> pretty heavy in terms of memory consumption, so it doesn't buy you
> much.
>
> As far as I know, Meebo is all javascript in the client and works fine.
>
>
> Stephen
>