Programming Jabber

Keyword Assistant

Many of the Jabber core and peripheral developers hang out in a conference room called jdev hosted by the Conferencing component on the Jabber server running at jabber.org. While a lot of useful information is to be gleaned from listening to what goes on in jdev, it isn’t possible to be there all the time. Conversations in jdev are logged to web pages, which can be used to visit after the fact to try to catch up with things; however, this can be a hopeless task. One solution is to build a ‘bot that looks for specific keywords and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) in the conversations in jdev and send those on as Jabber messages.

This script, keyassist, connects to a Jabber server, enters a conference room, and listens to the conversations, looking for certain words and phrases to be uttered. The keyassist script is given a bit of “intelligence” in that it can be interacted with and told, while running, to watch for (or stop watching for), certain words and phrases.

The keyassist script introduces us to programmatic interaction with the Conferencing component. Before looking at the script, however, let’s have a brief overview of Conferencing in general.