Today, Colin and I (he's co-writing this post—yay SEE!) are going to talk about joscar, a new and major feature of the upcoming 1.0 release.

Joscar is a library written in Java for interfacing with services that use the OSCAR protocol. There are three of these: AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. Other services use different protocols that are not OSCAR; for this reason, we'll still be using libgaim for these services.

Joscar was written by Keith Lea (username “leak” on Trac), originally as part of the Joust client. He has helped Evan and Augie tremendously with getting it working in Adium.

With joscar, file transfer and Direct IM actually work. Finally, an end to the inability to send and receive files (at least on AIM-esque services). And joscar has a cleaner codebase, so Adium developers can read and modify it more easily. It's faster, too; faster, even, than libgaim.

Libgaim is not going away, however. As mentioned above, we still need it for other protocols. So 1.0 will still have libgaim, for all the non-OSCAR services. (UPDATE 2006-10-08: Also, joscar's ICQ support is not very shiny yet, so we're still using libgaim for ICQ in the meantime. —Peter)

If you have any further questions about joscar, feel free to ask them in the comments, on the forums, or on the IRC channel.