The AOL APIs: Open AIM

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) is surely one of the core software components provided by AOL. AIM has a registered user base that is rapidly closing in on 100 Million users. The Open AIM API provides developers and startups with an opportunity to integrate access to their sites and applications for the entire AIM community. It's kind of like instantly signing up tens of millions of users -- a nice way to start out when you're deploying your new venture.

AOL regularly applies this business model. For example, everyone who has an AIM account now has an AOL OpenID account and an AIM Page.

There are many different ways you can apply the Open AIM APIs:

• AIM Plugins allow you to add custom features to AIM clients
• AIM Bots allow you to create an automated AIM user that can provide services to human AIM users
• AIM Custom Clients can be built to replace the standard AIM client, integrating capabilities that suit your own unique business needs
• AIM Presence applies the AIM APIs to establish dynamically updated presence through a Web page
• Web AIM (see also "The AOL APIs: Web AIM") provides capability to apply the AIM APIs through a Web interface
• the AIM Phoneline API is an add-on API that integrates voice-over-Internet-protocol (VOIP) capability into AIM using the Open AIM APIs

Resources

The Open AIM site (developer.aim.com) is of course your starting point for using Open AIM. There you can browse introductory documentation, find out about registering for developer keys, download the Open API, etc.

We've published a wide array of tutorial articles about how to apply the OpenAIM API in various ways. Take advantage of these articles to get yourself up and running quickly using OpenAIM:

• "Creating AIM-Enabled Applications in Java, Part 1" by James Turner
• "Creating AIM-Enabled Applications in Java, Part 2" by James Turner
• "Creating an AIM Plugin in C# Using the .NET Framework" by Doug Schwartz
• "Creating an AIM Lite Plugin" by Doug Schwartz
• "Creating an AIM Lite Plugin to Receive and Save a Text File" by Doug Schwartz
• "Creating an AIM Lite Plugin to Send a Text File - Part 2" by Doug Schwartz

A search for "Open AIM" on dev.aol.com brings up an enormous number of pages, including blog posts that demonstrate how to apply specific features of Open AIM.

Finally, if you visit the AOL Developer Network Mashup Gallery, you'll find several mashups that integrate AIM to produce unique capabilities.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media