I was thinking up how to illustrate the various aspects of the IM api ... and rather than write up posts about each facet with info about them , my 'current' idea is this :
We will author a client - you and me together.
It wont be a fancy swing client : I am horrible at UI anyway
Instead of just writing dry posts with some code snippet , what I will do is actually build a new text based client from scratch using the IM api.
We will incrementally add functionality to it ... showcasing each aspect of it as we proceed.
It will not be exhaustive , obviously ... and you will be able to write far more fancier and powerful clients than what I will end up authoring here.
But the basic idea of how to use the IM api should be evident.

As I illustrated in the previous post , the client as such is going to be agnostic to the underlying communication mechanism ... so you can easily switch to using different session provider to use httpbind , tunnel through socks/https proxy ,  use legacy SSL mode , etc : just a couple of line changes.
The rest of the client would remain the same.

Most probably , I will create a new project in dev.java.net with view-all permission.
So let the series begin from next post !