Jabber4R is out...finally ;-)

Project page:  http://www.infoether.com/ruby/jabber4r
Download URL:
http://www.infoether.com/ruby/jabber4r/releases/jabber4r-0.1.0.zip

Jabber4R was created to allow a Ruby application to connect to an existing
Jabber account as an additional resource. This is not meant to be a library
to create a complete Ruby-based Jabber IM client. It currently does not
support creation of accounts and managing presence subscriptions (although
it will in the next release). It was written for ease of use, not
completeness. It does support:

* Connection to an account (plain text or SHA digest)
* Access to Roster (buddy list)
* Tracking of presence of resources in the Roster (including local account
resources)
* Sending and receiving messages (normal, chat, etc)

What can you do with this? You could write a ruby application that allows
you to query it by IM for status, control, etc. You could use this as a
communications channel backbone for a Ruby application (which is my intent).
Imagine running this in your servers and then being able to (by looking at
your buddy list) see which ones are online/offline and event controlling
them.

Here is an example connect/send message/disconnect:

include "jabber4r/jabber4r"

session = Jabber::Session.bind_digest("myaccount / jabber.com/laptop",
"password")
session.new_chat_message("Rich_Kilmer / jabber.com").set_body("Hey").send
session.release.

BTW:  Jabber is open-source (www.jabber.org) and free.  Jabber also has a
commercial group (www.jabber.com) and they are making their 100-user Jabber
servers available for free (the commerical one).

Have fun!

-Rich

PS..Since this is the initial release, its bound to have problems.  Please
feel free to email me directly about them.