phurple - libpurple bindings for PHP

[Peter Lawler]

On 10/01/14 06:58, Anatol Belski wrote:
>> Yes, there are recipients on this list who know how to do it but they're
>> probably still under NDA so I doubt we'll ever hear too much from them on
>> this topic
>>
> The way to do that is more or less obvious. The question is more about man
> hours, feasibility and willingness. As the patch would be gigantic. Plus,
> all the external plugins have to be eventually adapted.

A-yup.

I don't mean any offence to the devs or CPW's, but generally speaking 
there's probably about half a dozen people who are frequently active on 
libpurple (the rest I'd say are infrequent, or retired but prompt for 
patches when/where needed). They do it in their free time, so they tend 
to hack on what they want for themselves.

Given the size the patchset would be, I can't foresee it happening 
without major sponsorship of a couple of devs full time or a corporate 
doing it and (properly) handing the code upstream.

Now the conspiracy theorists may suggest that Meebo et all just didn't 
hand code upstream. I'm more of the mind they probably used some 
middleware to (a) provide a form of thread safety (b) make it easier to 
keep possible damage from API changes between FE & BE down by not 
necessarily having to change both FE or BE code and suffer unexpected 
changes elsewhere in their system. Dunno what the kids do these days, 
but back when I was an engineer the coders used CORBA (yeah yeah yeah, 
I'm old!) type stuff to provide this sort of glue.

Which kind of brings to mind. What would be actually be 'better' for 
PHP? libpurple bindings, or generic IM type API to which libpurple and 
other backends could utilise.

Pete.