Building a jabber bot with Bot::Backend

There are many ways to write a (jabber/xmpp) chat bot. A quick search for "Jabber Bot" turns up Net::Jabber::Bot, Bot::JabberBot, Bot::Backbone::Service::JabberChat, Bot::Jabbot, IM::Engine, AnyEvent::XMPP and more. You'll see even more if you search for XMPP instead.

How to choose?

I started with Net::Jabber::Bot, but ran into problems connecting to google-talk based chat. Jabber modules built on AnyEvent::XMPP (seem to) connect to google-auth better than those built on Net::XMPP. This is moot now that I have a normal jabber server, but it still tripped me up. The pod doc lays out funny, so I patched and filed a change-request at github.

Knowing that I would eventually want an event-loop based app, I focused on AnyEvent::XMPP packages. Bot::Backbone and IM::Engine are both interesting abstractions. IM::Engine is quote "currently alpha quality with serious features missing and is rife with horrible bugs." Perhaps I should be happy that he admits this up front? On to Bot::Backbone and sugary Moose!

Once I realized that the group_domain wouldn't be automatically filled in as "conference.$domain" in Bot::Backbone::Service::JabberChat, I was able to connect to a group chat room on my jabber server!

Follow along with my bot, App::Sulla on github. Thus far I have a working connection that responds to "!time" requests -- I've even fixed the part where it threw warnings on all other messages!

#this code in my dispatch table:
    also not_command not_to_me run_this {
            my ( $self, $message ) = @_;
            respond { "hello world" };
    };

# lead to the following error on every other chat message:
unhandled callback exception on event (message, AnyEvent::XMPP::Ext::MUC=HASH(0x3746818), AnyEvent::XMPP::Ext::MUC::Room=HASH(0x3a6d700) ANY_STRING ): Can't call method "add_predicate_or_return" on an undefined value at perl5/lib/perl5/Bot/Backbone/DispatchSugar.pm line 124.

I decided I wanted to pass the auth and channel information into App::Sulla as parameters to the constructor. This didn't play very well with the service sugar. service executes at compile time and squirrels away the configuration hash for the service into services. I added a before modifier to construct_services which is called during run just before initializing each service.