Jim McGarry, Exam Proctoring center, sent me this question:
I want to send an IM (AIM) based on user input on a webpage to one of about 6 recipients whose ids I know. User wouldn’t compose IM – it would be something like ‘ “netid” is here for a meeting’ where netid is a field he enters.
This got complicated fast. AIM uses a proprietary protocol. Any APIs or code modules have been reverse engineered by traffic snooping. Nothing goggled up from php land except for one Russian library I didn’t want to trust
I did find a perl module, Net::OSCAR . But to run on cgi.uvm.edu (which historically is where perl, C, python, or other non-php scripts live), it needed XML::Parser . So I asked SAA if they could install XML::Parser on cgi.uvm.edu, and they told me that they hope to retire cgi.uvm.edu sometime this fall, would we like to test something new. I said, “Sure.”
So here’s the deal. epc and waw now have our own virtual web servers
Put php and perl scripts there, in www-root. Access and error message logs found in www-logs. You will need to install Net::OSCAR and any other necessary perl modules following these set-up instructions
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2980297/how-can-i-use-cpan-as-a-non-root-user
followed by
cpanm Net:OSCAR
add these lines to perl scripts to tell script where to find locally installed perl modules
use lib ‘/users/e/p/epc/perl5/lib/perl5’;
use lib ‘/users/e/p/epc/perl5/lib/perl5/x86_64-linux-thread-multi’;
I wrote the perl script using sample provided by Net::OSCAR, sent it to Jim with instructions
change these two lines
my $screenname = “screenname”;
my $password = “password”;
to send “holy moley batman” to screen name “maddodskideath” …
http://waw.w3.uvm.edu/aim.pl?to=maddogskideath&message=holy+moley+Batman
