Libpurple.com

In the previous post, Writing Your First Instant Messaging Program, we made an IM program that was only capable of capturing four different events. Those four events were when the IM account was connected, an instant message was received from a buddy...

Okay, so assuming you have libpurple installed, you can now write your first instant messaging program. This will be written in C. If you’re not too familiar with C, don’t worry. I’ll guide you through it.
First things first, you’ll need to open your terminal. In this case, we’ll be using bash for the shell and nano (same as pico) for the text editor. CD to the directory where you want to run your program and create a file called hello.c (user is your...

Installing libpurple is actually pretty easy. For this example, I will show you how to install libpurple on Ubuntu Linux using apt-get (should work on Debian as well).
In your terminal, type:
And…well…that’s it! And hopefully, libpurple was installed with no errors. However, if you do have errors, please feel free to leave a comment below....

Okay, so starting things off, what the heck is libpurple??
If you google a definition for libpurple, you’ll get something like, “Pidgin (formerly named Gaim) is a multi-platform instant messaging client, based on a library named libpurple.”
So basically, libpurple is a programming interface for instant messaging over various networks (such as AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, etc.). Pidgin, on the other hand, is an instant messaging application that uses libpurple and includes a GUI (graphical user...