Is there any advanced documentation?

I have been going through the SDK files and the example code, and I've managed to build a simple bot that responds to basic commands. Since the javadocs (and the samples) are very, very weak, explanation-wise, I was wondering if any advanced documentation existed? You know, something that would explain all the different types of secondary sessions, or how a bot can receive files or images from a client (or send them to a client), or even how a bot can set up an audio/visual session with a user...

Some things can be figured out by trial and error -- just logging every event received by the bot, and then chatting with it, logging the client in and out, etc. to see what messages are sent. But sometimes this isn't enough, and it would be nice to have a real set of documentation that would explain the ins-and-outs of the bot world :).

One recommendation I'd like to pass along to the developer group is quite simple: please add reasonable "toString()" methods in your Java objects. Right now, printing out an object doesn't yield any useful information. I've spent a lot of time writing methods that create reasonable representations for an object's state. I'm not even sure that the representations I'm creating are 100% correct, because some of the values in those objects are poorly defined, or not explained at all. I haven't had the time to write methods for more than just the 30 or so primary object types that I've seen come across in messages. It would be nice if something like this could be included in the SDK.

One final request: would it be possible to get the source code for the Java classes in the SDK? I know a lot of methods end up calling native methods, but it would still be useful (and educational) to see what is going on under the covers.

Thanks!

Responding to the above one issue at a time...

BOT Documentation and samples:

We do have Java Docs on
http://dev.aol.com/aimclient/OpenAIM182/java-docs/index.html

There is a BOT sample here... http://dev.aol.com/node/839/subscribe and
some information here too... http://dev.aol.com/articles_aim

Please email me offline at for sample code on
implementing file/video/audio services in BOTs.

Re BOT Documentation, what specifically would you like to see that is not
already covered in the SDK documents here... http://dev.aol.com/aim/bots or
http://dev.aol.com/aimclient/OpenAIM182/reference/index.html

The toString method: At this point we do not plan to add this method to the
SDK but we are keeping this in mind for the future.

Regarding releasing source code to Java classes in the SDK... The Java
wrapper is very very very thin. We doubt it would provide any help and
this is code that is internal.

Also check out http://dev.aol.com/aim/code and the BotTest sample under the
section on BOTS.