Crisis Averted!

Keith Grennan recently described how he used Jabber::Bot to create an e-mail notifier, complete with code examples. Through a wicked combination of procmail, Perl, Jabber::Bot and Growl, he receives a sweet little notification when he's got new mail. Nice!

Jabber::Bot 1.1.1 is now available. This release includes a minor change to the listener thread that should improve CPU usage in some cases.

Some folks have directly or indirectly reported that Jabber::Bot tends to peg CPU usage at 100%. This is due to how the underlying Jabber::Simple framework handles incoming messages. Jabber::Bot 1.1.1 should alleviate these CPU usage pains in most cases.

Download:
jabber-bot-1.1.1.gem
jabber-bot-1.1.1.tar.gz

Jabber::Bot 1.1.0 is now available. New in this release is support for Jabber presence, including presence (available, away, do not disturb, etc.), status messages, and priority. There are several other additions, changes and fixes in the full release history.

Despite my best efforts for a bug-free initial release of Jabber::Bot, a few choice issues found their way in, including one line of debug code. Oops.

With that, Jabber::Bot 1.0.1 is now available. Fixes include the removal of said degug statement, and two regex fixes. The release history has all the details.

Jabber::Bot makes it simple to create a Jabber bot with little fuss. It is a perfect starting point for creating and customizing a powerful Jabber bot, public or private. A Jabber::Bot's command repertoire is a combination of regular expressions and pure Ruby code. With a little creativity, there's really nothing a Jabber::Bot can't do.

For example, I recently created a Jabber::Bot that interfaces with a custom Lace chat room I extended with a RESTful API, and it's been working great.

Installing Jabber::Bot is a snap with RubyGems: gem install jabber-bot.

You'll find some brief documentation with examples on the Jabber::Bot home page. Also, the RubyGem contains full RDoc, and the gzipped tarball includes a sample Jabber::Bot implementation.

I've been putting it off for a few years now, but I recently found myself the proud owner of the Pickaxe book. (Thanks Ryan!) What once seemed as mindbending as hardcore Perl is now very much less so, and a pleasure to work with so far. Though only a week into learning Ruby, I'm happy to have made the leap.