Instant Messenger in PHP?

Question

I am woking on another project, and need to be able to create an online instant messenger that combines everybody's chat (Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Google , etc) into one in order to provide the user with an easy way to chat with all their friends and not have to download anything. I was thinking of doing this with PHP, but I'm not exactly sure how I would go about it. I have Googled this, but wasn't able to find any answers.

Answer 1

There are a number of things that you should start looking into here.

• XMPP is the protocol that most of these systems use. It stands for XML Presence Protocol, and is the format in which messages are sent.

• Jabber, is an open source system that a lot of Chat clients are built on

• JWChat is an open source, web-based system that seems to do roughly what you are looking for. http://blog.jwchat.org/jwchat/-

There is lots of information out there, so starting with a google search for XMPP I think you will find a wealth of information to start you on your project.

Answer 2

The Phurple project is somewhat incomplete, but as it builds on the Pidgin / libpurple core most of your requirements / messaging platforms are already supported, and you can just update libpurple using your package manager of choice to keep up-to-date on protocols. You do have to create deamon scripts to keep users logged in, it would not be advisable to try to keep connected in a webserver's process. A flow could simply be:

• User logs in
• Deamon process is spawned which logs in to users accounts.
• Further ajaxy requests from page connect to daemon process
• With a custom session handler you can easily destroy the daemon process on timeout of session.

On a side note: I would not want to be responsible for keeping logins & passwords to the users accounts. Make it your core concern that these are safe at all time

Answer 3

You'll probably want to use an existing IM library. Check out Telepathy and libpurple.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) neither of these work directly with PHP (though it looks like there is a PHP DBUS library, which could be used to communicate with Telepathy). However, Telepathy does have a pre-made Python API; you might consider doing your app using Django or Pylons.