How to put something in system tray?

[Scott Rubin <slr2777 cs rit edu>]

I've been using gaim for a long time now.  It is written with gtk and 
compiles for both windows and linux.  I noticed that whether gaim runs 
in KDE, Gnome, XFCE4, Windows or other os/window managers it always 
manages to successfully put a button in the system tray (notification 
area).  How is this done?  Is it even done using GTK or something else?  
Is it possible to do it in a program written in pygtk?  I'm thinking I 
don't want to write this project in C because it will just make it more 
difficult.  Thanks in advance.

-Scott