Problems in implementing our approach

Lack of information.

We rely on an outside library called icqlib to support connection between our server and the ICQ server. This is an open source project that was originally aimed at being used as a core of a graphic client (kicq) and as such has no documentation. In order to implement the project, we had to explore the icqlib package ourselves and we ended up writing our very own documentation for icqlib which is, for the best of our knowledge, the only public source of information about this package.

Need for non-standard solutions to integrate outside sources.

We have an open source C library that should enable some interface to the ICQ network. In order to operate it we needed to ``make it talk'' with the Java applet. This problem has been partially resolved when we chose to implement the server in C and reduced to the problem of finding the suitable connection between a Java applet and a C server.