TOC protocol
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The TOC protocol or the Talk to OSCAR protocol is a legacy communications protocol used by some third-party AOL Instant Messenger clients, and several clients AOL produced but has abandoned. AOL no longer uses the protocol in any of the IM clients it actively maintains, such as its Windows and Mac clients for the AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ systems, however, it once did produce several of its own TOC clients, including TiK and TAC which are written in Tcl/Tk, TNT which is written in Emacs Lisp, all of which are open source, and a Java client originally called TIC and which later became the Quick Buddy web applet. AOL also provides the TOC protocol specification openly to developers in the hopes that they will use it instead of the proprietary OSCAR protocol they use themselves. AOL continues to offer TOC support, so these clients should still work.
TOC is an ASCII-based protocol, while OSCAR is a binary protocol. In addition, TOC contains fewer features than its OSCAR counterpart. OSCAR provides such functionality as buddy icons, file transfer, and advertising.
External links
- Protocol specification (http://simpleaim.sourceforge.net/docs/TOC.txt)
- History of AIM, OSCAR and TOC (http://gridley.res.carleton.edu/~straitm/final/)
Implementations
- Py-TOC (http://www.jamwt.com/Py-TOC/) (python)
- Net::AIM (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-AIM/AIM.pm) (perl)
- PHPTocLib (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phptoclib/) (php)
- BlueTOC (http://www.therisenrealm.com/scripts/bluetoc/) (php)
- Tik (http://tik.sourceforge.net) (Tcl/Tk)
- TNT (http://tnt.sourceforge.net) (Emacs Lisp)
- TAC (http://users.tmok.com/~smike/) (Tcl, non-GUI)
- AOL Quick Buddy Applet (TIC) (http://toc.oscar.aol.com) (Java Applet)
- naim (http://site.n.ml.org/info/naim/) (ncurses, non-GUI)