mlOscar

In 2004 I created an OCaml library for accessing the AOL instant messenger network. It is no longer maintained, but may be useful as a reference.

Following from the original page:

mlOscar 0.9.0

mlOscar is an OCaml library that facilitates the encoding/decoding of the AOL OSCAR protocol.  Networking functionality is available to enable access to the AIM network

It has been tested using OCaml 3.07.

Download

mloscar-0.9.0.tar.bz2

md5sums are here.

Bugs

The library doesn't handle full 32-bit values correctly on 32-bit systems (the most significant bit is lost). Fortunately,OSCAR doesn't rely on the most significant bit in most (all?) situations [that matter].

The IP address of the aim server is hard-coded into the library. Ideally a DNS lookup should be used. The capability of specifying an alternate server would be nice.

Documentation

Documentation has been lost. To understand how it works, take a look at the sample program.
Changelog can be found here.

Quickstart

mlOscar uses OCamlConf
Type "configure" to generate a Makefile.
buddydump uses OCamlMakefilefor the build process.

Examples

The following example program is included to demonstrate the use of the
library:

• buddydump - small program that logs on, dumps buddy list
  information to the screen until the user types "q".  A cursory
  examination of the source will reveal how to handle and generate
  various interesting events (such as message typing notification,
  sending messages, processing server acknowledgments, etc.)
  

Credits

Alexandr Shutko's OSCAR documentation was extremely useful. Ethereal dumps of AIM client-server traffic from gaim and Net::OSCAR were also beneficial.

License

mlOscar is licensed under the MIT license.