Programming Jabber

A Simple Script

Before moving on, let’s have a look at how simple it is to interact with Jabber. Example 1-1 shows a simple Perl script that connects to a Jabber server, authenticates, checks who’s online, and sends those people a reminder message. It uses the Net::Jabber library, which provides a high-level API to many Jabber-related functions such as handling the connection to the server (this is via another library that Net::Jabber uses—XML::Stream), authentication, events, and all the mechanisms to parse and create Jabber traffic.

Example 1-1. A simple Jabber script

#!/usr/bin/perl use Net::Jabber qw(Client); use strict; # List of addressees for our reminder our @addressees; # What we want to send my $reminder = $ARGV[0] or die "No reminder!"; # Connect to our Jabber server my $c= Net::Jabber::Client->new(); $c->Connect('hostname' => 'yak', 'port' => 5222); # Authenticate $c->AuthSend('username' => 'reminder', 'password' => 'secret', 'resource' => 'reminder'); # Set handler to deal with presence packets # that might (will) be pushed to us (we're # not interested in any other type of packet) $c->SetCallBacks('presence' => \&handle_presence); # Send out our own presence, and run an # event loop for up to 5 seconds to # catch any packets pushed to us $c->PresenceSend(); $c->Process(5); # Create a new message with our reminder text my $m = Net::Jabber::Message->new(); $m->SetBody($reminder); # Send the message to each of the addressees collected # in the handle_presence() subroutine ...