jYMSG API - Yahoo IM and Chat for Java / News: Recent posts

Work on the upcoming v0.6 of jYMSG has continued in fits and starts. It will boast more new features than any previous update. Because of the scope of some of the changes (identities for example, which impact on a large part of the protocol and API) a pre-v0.6 source only version is now available for developers to play with and comment on.

The 251k zip file is located here:
http://jymsg9.sourceforge.net/ymsg_code_source_v0_59.zip... read more

The API can now log into Yahoo once more. Both old and new methods of authentification encoding are now supported (whew!!!)

Please report any problems via the usual channels...

Yahoo have recently started to send out messages to its IM users, asking them to upgrade to the latest version before 24th September 2003, when they hint they will disable support for older protocols.

This API may be affected by these changes. To the best of my knowledge the API is already compliant with the latest protocol - except for the protocol number in the header.

To fix this, edit the NetworkConstants.java file and change the 0x09 byte at the start of the two header arrays to 0x0a .

I've had little time to update jYMSG9 over the last few months. I've been checking up on the bugs which have been posted, and fixing as many as I can (thankyou to all those people who actually posted suggested code changes - that makes my life a LOT easier!)

The new version (if it ever arrives) will feature...

- A better test client. Let's face it, the old one was creaking, so this one has a much more flexible interface, and is less confusing.... read more

Spotted some interesting bugs in V0.2 after I uploaded it to sourceforge - one of them meant that the default constructor would always fail (how that got through testing I'll never know!)

Rather than create a new release, as the changes were rather minor, I've replaced the files in the current 0.2 with new 0.21 versions, and deleted the originals.

Support added for file transfer (but not via P2P) and, more importantly, SOCKS and HTTP proxying. (Is this the first unofficial Yahoo messenger implementation to feature support for SOCKS/HTTP ?)

http://jymsg9.sourceforge.net/news_20030409.txt

I know I've covered some of this stuff elsewhere, and in private emails, but for the record here's a fairly complete run down of what's happening to jYSMG9 for the next version.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

The second alpha release of the Java-based API for communicating with Yahoo messenger is currently well into development. Possibly the most interesting new feature is support for both SOCKS and HTTP proxying - this may well be a first for any openly available Yahoo library.

Java supports both SOCKS and HTTP proxying in its own network API's, and indeed you'll be glad to hear the YMSG9 API uses the same system properties to configure its own network settings. However, the need for complete control over the HTTP connection (plus the fact that Yahoo doesn't always send correctly formatted HTTP data) has meant that the HTTP handlers are having to be custom written for the project.... read more