Frameworking realtime communications

While looking into flexible ways of writing an IRC bot(the nature of which will probably be in a "Tech Tuesday" post for tomorrow; It's a comm routing bot, so don't complain about IRC != IM quite yet.), I tried using IM libraries. I started with libpurple, because I use Pidgin all the time. That was utter failure, as I couldn't find enough organized documentation to even write a stub quickly.

Then I tried playing with telepathy. I wasn't able to get it to work in the few minutes I had left that evening, but I did learn a few things.

First, it's awesomely flexible, and there are tools that exist that allow a GUI user to essentially interact with it the same way your program might, which let me immediately dive in and try testing some capabilities.

Second, it's missing a decent IRC backend. The closest was "haze", which I couldn't get to connect to more than one IRC network at a time. Turns out Haze is just a glue module between Telepathy and libpurple, and the one-IRC-connection-at-a-time thing is a libpurple limitation. (I'm glad I didn't waste my time thoroughly studying the libpurple header files; It wouldn't have done what I needed, anyway.) I might be able to use multiple libpurple instances, but I don't know how safe that would be; libpurple uses a common filesystem location, I don't have control over it through Telepathy, and I can't trust it to be multi-instance safe in its access patterns.

Telepathy is interesting because it allows multiple connections, any of which routed through any number of connection modules. One could conceivably create a program that talks to fifteen different networks using one or as many protocols.

Darn cool. I wish it had better support for IRC as a client (and maybe as a server...who knows what kinds of options that opens up?). Support for things like identi.ca and Twitter would be pretty cool as well.