standalone program in C

The project is to build a standalone program in C which can bridge between Ruby on Rails and IM networks, using libpurple as the backend. The program should be a state-machine, using async I/O to accept commands from RoR with a RESTful API exported using lighttpd, and making async calls to the RoR side using libcurl. The incoming REST API should allow for logging into IM accounts, sending IM messages to users, and checking idleness of users. Incoming IM messages should be forwarded with libcurl to the RoR app using a REST API. This daemon should never block, it should be lightweight, and a single process should be able to handle multiple ongoing conversations on multiple networks. It should be very easy to keep up with future upgrades to libpurple. Furthermore, there should be a facility for running multiple processes in parallel. The guys at Aardvark seem to have had success with this approach already: [login to view URL]