We need a way of giving a Ruby on Rails application the ability to communicate with users on various IM networks.
The project is to build a standalone program in C which can bridge between Ruby on Rails and IM networks, using libpurple as the backend. The program should be a state-machine driven, using async I/O to accept commands from RoR with a RESTful API exported using lighttpd, and making async calls to the RoR side using libcurl.
The incoming API should allow for logging into accounts, sending messages to users, and checking idleness of users. Incoming messages should be forwarded with libcurl to the RoR app using a REST API.
It should never block, it should be lightweight, and a single process should be able to handle multiple ongoing conversations on multiple networks.
It should be very easy to keep up with future upgrades to libpurple.
Furthermore, there should be a facility for running multiple processes in parallel.
The guys at Aardvark seem to have had success with this approach already: http://blog.vark.com/?p=144