IM bot w/ libpurple, finch,pidgin, gaim with C, C++ or perl

I want to write a IM (Instant Messaging) robot.

I want you to write for me an IM wrapper.

Robot   Wrapper.


I need help for the part of actually interfacing to the different IM networks. I need a C/C++/Perl programmer that can script around libpurple so that it’s functionality is exposed as web services. (Don’t think of SOAP, just a simple URLs that receive parameters and return status with error codes and text).

Functionality needed is:
• Accepting invitations of new buddies.
• Sending invitations to new buddies.
• Send an IM message.
• Receive an IM message.
• Receive notification of online status of buddies.
• Query status of buddies.

All networks must be supported, altough in the beginning we will start testing only with four networks:
• Yahoo
• Windows Messenger
• Google talk
• ICQ

Every time it needs to do something, the robot will just call a URL of the wrapper.
For example, to send an IM message: http://127.0.0.1:81/libpurplewrapper/sendmessage?network=ICQ&buddy=john&message=lets+have+lunch.

The wrapper will respond with a suitable HTTP message, for example:
Status: 200
Message Sent

The robot (the part I write), will also listen for notifications from the wrapper as URLs. For example, if a user goes offline:
http://127.0.0.1:82/robot/wentoffline?network=ICQ&buddy=john

The robot will respond with a suitable HTTP message, as above.

The wrapper will receive on startup a simple key/value configuration file with the credentials to log in to the different networks, and the urls to which to send notifications.

The wrapper must abstract away the issues of the different networks and work the same for all networks (in the future we might try to take advantage of network-specific feature, but that should not be addressed at this stage).

The wrapper should run on linux, and can depend on popular Linux software packages (Perl, Apache, etc).

Security: the robot and the wrapper will communicate in a private network, so we don’t need passwords, keys, encryption, etc. But the robot will talk with untrusted parties and the wrapper should properly escape special chars inside the message. For example, if someone sends a message containing an ampersand (&) then it must be escaped so that the robot sees it as part of the message and not as a parameter separator in the URL.

The software must be well documented, maintainable, easy to compile, easy to install and run.

I am open to suggestions, even on things specified in this document: if you think other technologies/programming languages/libraries are more suitable for this project, and you can justify it I want to hear.

Once we settle on the exact requirements you will be required to deliver as promised and fix bugs during at least 1 year.