Gus What?!

A number of you are trying out the recently released AIM SDK 1.6.7. I thought it would be a good idea to answer some of the early questions. So here they are in my usual Q&A style…

Q: What SDK files do I need to run an Open AIM client or bot?
A: You need to copy some of the DLL files from the dist\release folder into your application’s folder. You can omit the jg*.dll files if you don’t need to support talk (aka voice) sessions with legacy AIM clients like AOL 9.x and AIM 5.9. You can also omit the sipxtapi.dll if you don’t need to support the newer SIP based Audio/Video sessions in AIM 6.x. You only need the accjwrap.dll and the accjwrap.jar files if your bot or client is written in Java. All other DLLs are required.

Q: What are all these new DLLs for?
A: We added support for SSL based encryption to Open AIM clients, which is based on NSS and NSPR from Mozilla. We also updated the audio/video stacks for full multimedia support in Open AIM.

Q: How do I enable SSL based encryption in my bot or client?
A: You can enable this via the boolean preference named “aimcc.connect.secure”. The default is false.

Q: What does SSL based encryption protect?
A: This encrypts all regular IM traffic between the client and the AIM host. It will not encrypt direct IMs, picture sharing sessions, A/V sessions, file transfers, buddy art retrievals and uploads, or alerts. Note: for end to end security your buddy also needs to be running a client that uses SSL encryption, like AIM 6.5.9.1.

If I did not answer your question, feel free to ask in a comment or post it in one of the forums.

With AOL’s recent announcement on Open AIM 2.0 now live and getting lots of great attention, I thought I should write a quick post on it. This is truly exciting news. We are dramatically expanding our community when we open things up like this. So with that, I want to say “Welcome” to all the great developers out there. Here is this incredible AIM network that you can now use and build on.

I have actually been a part of the AIM core team for a number of months now, so I am available to help answer questions on Open AIM. I can now claim to have written code in imapp.dll, acccore.dll, coolcoreXX.dll, and xprtX.dll. Lastly, this guy sits next to me.

There are more great things to come.