Facebook in Pidgin

Mark Doliner mark at kingant.net
Thu Nov 20 20:54:08 EST 2008


Background:
* Facebook added IM to their site in April.  It uses their own
proprietary protocol which uses HTTP requests and comet/HTTP
long-polling with JSON formatted data.
* They have announced that they're working on letting people log in
using XMPP, but they have not announced a timeframe
* I and a few other Pidgin gives have access to a beta version of
their XMPP server, for testing purposes.  It works, but that doesn't
mean it's ready to be released to the public
* Eion Robb wrote a Facebook plugin for Pidgin:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/  Word on the street is
that it's crashy.

My question is: How do people feel about adding a Facebook PRPL to
Pidgin that implements their HTTP protocol?  I think it's a good idea
because Facebook is pretty popular, and I think this would keep Pidgin
current and give us a little edge.  Maybe attract more developer
interest, etc.  The only reason I see for not doing it is that there
would be less incentive for Facebook to finish their XMPP interface.
But honestly I don't think we have a lot of leverage there.

I've taken Eion's plugin and modified with reckless abandon, renaming
variables and functions, moving stuff around, changing the order of
stuff, changing // comments to /* */, removing as many forward
function declarations as possible, depending on features added in
recent versions of Pidgin, etc.  I also made it more stable by keeping
track of the return values from purple_proxy_connect() and
purple_input_add() and purple_timeout_add() and freeing/closing them
appropriately.  And I think I disabled some features (search for
'MARK' to see what I mean.)  Eion: Please don't hate me.  My version
is attached.

-Mark
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