A Case Study: UIMThe Universal Instant Messenger

Babak Esfandiari

Carleton University

SYSC 5800

Winter 2003

What is UIM?

UIM is a small Instant Messaging program, developed by your instructor for this course!

Unfortunately it only works locally, in a single JVM…

It will be up to you to make it work over the internet!

But What is Instant Messaging?

One of the most popular internet tools Allows users to send and receive short

messages to “buddies” over the net Users can track the availability of their buddies More features have been added to most

programs: file transfer, audio, even video…

Some IM Programs

ICQ, by Mirabilis (later purchased by AOL)– the pioneer

AIM (AOL) MSN Messenger Yahoo Messenger Jabber

How Does IM Work?

It is one of the first popular peer-to-peer applications

Usually a server manages the user ids, their buddy list and status info

But clients communicate directly with one another

But not all IM tools work this way..

IM Challenges and Promises

Scalability Performance Privacy Standardization

– Jabber, SIMPLE, … Integration in other tools “Presence” a desired feature for many devices!

(not only for humans…)

Back to UIM

You will be asked to enhance UIM The next few slides will give you an overview of

its initial design.

UIM Requirements

UIM States

UIM Packages

The Client Package

The Server Package

Interaction 1: Status Update

Interaction 2: Sending an IM

Running UIM

Unzip the Jar file run the main() method in the AgentGui class it will open two UIM windows (one on top of the

other) you can now register users, log them on,

change their status, send messages…