This was a very exciting week, and a good start to my summer project. I was able to make good progress on my login code for the Yahoo! Messenger protocol plug-in. After coding this week, I truly understand how complex Yahoo’s authentication system is for their messenger service. The complexity arises from both the use of binary packets, and a mixture of HTTP and pure TCP/IP communication.
Based on the protocol documentation found on IM Freedom, authenticating the user and logging in requires six different steps. So far, I’ve implemented two of these steps, and made a YahooPacket class which greatly simplifies building protocol-compatible packets.
My hope is that, by then end of next week, I will have at least four of the login steps implemented. If I make bigger strides than expected, I might even have full login support done by next week, but we will have to see.
