A chat bot designed (almost) like a software project!
##Requirements Python 3.4+ (ohmygod venv)
Even now it is rather simple, make sure you create a venv first
Then run python setup.py develop
Now you should have a fully functioning autobot command within your venv!
It doesn't do much right now, though. You can chat with it on stdin :)
But it will come with time...
- Output formatting - can only do plaintext right now
- Hipchat client is not implemented (only simple XMPP)
- Proper help output
- ACL/Admins users
- Documentation
- Tests
Because, let's face it, everyone gives their chatbot their own names...
While Will has a rather good API, it also comes with some shortcomings. Some examples include:
- The reply method is not attached to the message object (so you need to figure out the reply path separately)
- Does not maintain a single plugin object instance for the bot, which meant that you were forced to hit the external storage even for rather ephemeral values
- You cannot attach more than one match decorator to a method, forcing you to write more complex regex or duplicating the method
- All matchers will always reply in will, so you cannot have a generic matcher to catch phrases that failed more specific ones
This together with the fact that I wanted to provide some new features I decided that it was a better choice to force the plugin owners to adapt their plugins to the new API. The transition should be fairly painless.
The scheduler in asyncio has a warning attached to it saying that you should not use it for timespans longer than 1 day, and that is a silly limitation to have when you are offering a cron-like scheduler to the users. I would have gotten decent thread pool management through executors, but using asyncio with the constraints and requirements imposed actually required more code than implementing a custom event loop and using proper queues and parallell processing patterns to develop this application.