phurple - libpurple bindings for PHP

[Anatol Belski]

Hi,

I'm Anatol Belski, PHP core developer. Some long time ago I was discussing
the possibility of a PHP binding on this lists, then the work was stuck.
Now it's moving again, not so long ago phurple-0.6.0 was released, which
supports PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5. So the goal of my writing is in the first
line to inform the  Pidgin community. Here are some useful links for a
quick overview (news, docs, src and bins)

http://belski.net/archives/39-Phurple-0.6.0-is-out.html
http://phurple.php.belski.net/
https://github.com/weltling/phurple
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phurple/
http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/PECL-extensions-RPM-status

After the big pause I've started to base my work on libpurple 2.10.7 as
the 3.0 seems not quite ready yet.

The native Visual Studio libpurple builds are available from the SF
project page. I saw some GSoC project with a try on similar, which was
however not finished. That builds are fully usable with Visual Studio,
import libs and headers of libpurple and all the deps are available. So it
could be interesting to some willing to work with native builds on
Windows, but in the first place it's dedicated to the PHP extension DLL.

I'd like to admit a couple of quirks from my point of view

- libpurple is still not thread safe
- i'm still grieving libpurple cannot get some less restrictive license
(just to mention, ignore this one)
- Pidgin windows builds are done with gcc, there are pro and contra of course
- related to above, compiling with native tools on windows some plugins in
the core couldn't be done, almost because they're not C89 compatible or
base on some C89 incompatible lib
- documentation on compatibility between 2.x and 3.x libpurple is somewhat
unclear, i personally feel a bit unsure about how to retain compatibility
in the future

I'd appreciate any feedback regarding phurple and that short list above.

And finally, I have to express my greateful thankfulness to the libpurple
core developers about the great work being done!

Best Regards

Anatol