This is Ruburple, a Ruby extension to libpurple (the library formerly known as libgaim).

It consists of a chunky C extension and a small piece of Ruby to wrap some of the C calls in a nicer package.

Dependencies:

libpurple 2.0.0: Distributed with Pidgin 2.0.0 (the application formerly known as Gaim): www.pidgin.im/
glib-2.0: Could possibly work with other versions, but right now my extconf.rb only looks for 2.0 (patches welcome): www.gtk.org/
pkg-config: Just for extconf.rb to be able to find glib-2.0. Should be installed when you install glib, AFAIK.

Hints:

I hade some trouble getting a precompiled set of libpurple libs with headers, so I downloaded the source.

Then, to build, I did:

./configure --disable-gtkui --disable-consoleui --disable-screensaver --disable-startup-notification --disable-sm --disable-gtkspell --disable-gevolution --disable-cap --disable-gstreamer --disable-tcl --disable-tk --disable-doxygen --disable-perl --with-gnutls-includes=/opt/local/include/ --with-gnutls-libs=/opt/local/lib/

This is mainly because I dont need any of the disabled features to get ruburple running, and the configure script had big trouble finding the gnutls headers and libs on its own.

Usage example (using almost all methods defined in the ruburple gem):

require 'ruburple'
Ruburple::init
Ruburple::subscribe(:received_im_msg, (Proc.new do |a,b,c,d,e| puts "rcv im: #{a}, #{b}, #{c}, #{d}, #{e}" end))
Ruburple::subscribe(:signed_on, (Proc.new do |a| puts "signed on: #{a}" end))
p = Ruburple::get_protocol("MSN")
puts "gonna connect to #{p.id}, #{p.name}, #{p.version}, #{p.summary}, #{p.description}, #{p.author}, #{p.homepage}"
a = p.get_account("[email protected]", "some_msn_password")
a.connect
a.connection.send_im("some_other@msn_account", "some message")
a.connection.close

It doesnt work!

Ruburple::debug = true

and mail me a description of the problem, and Ill see what I can do.