Announcing The CoreWitness Plug-in for Open AIM
This plug-in is a visualizer of sorts—in a “green-matrixy” sort of way. It logs all the calls that come from the IAccSession event source interface in the Open AIM SDK. This is a great way to learn about the Open AIM API and see how it works. It is also a great tool to help you debug your own clients and plug-ins.
All the enumerated types are decoded and shown using their symbolic names. The current state of some of the relevant objects like: BART items, messages, users, alerts and plugin information are also shown under certain conditions.
You can open the plug-in’s settings window from your client’s plug-in manager. It can also be opened it from the right-click context menu of the plug-in’s log window which is available in the actions menu on the buddy list as “Open CoreWitness Windowâ€.
Here are two screen shots (click to see larger images):
You can download this plug-in here. Please give it a try and let me know if you have any suggestions on how I could improve it. Thanks.
December 13th, 2006 at 1:07 am
I tried this out, and it works great. I wrote about my experimentation in my latest dev.aol.com blog post: Blog Subscriptions Review: Open AIM 1.2.3 and AIM CoreWitness Plug-in
This is a great tool for developers who want to learn about Open AIM and how the AIM SDK works.
December 13th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Excellent write-up. Thank you.
Yes, the API is quite a challenge to learn, especially for anyone outside of AOL or unfamiliar with AIM’s internal concepts. There is also a lot of dynamic behavior that is hard to explain and understand. A plug-in like this makes it easy to observe.
February 16th, 2007 at 9:54 am
[...] While I have not posted on this plug-in since I announced it back in December, I have been uploading minor improvements as soon as they were working. This plug-in is a great way to visualize how the Open AIM SDK works by observing the sequence of events it receives. [...]
May 13th, 2007 at 4:27 pm
i want to know how can i see the ims i sent or receievd to any one of my budddies
May 13th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
how can i see my ims that i recieved and sent to my buddies