Programming Jabber

The Script’s Scope

The Keyword Assistant (keyassist) script will be written in Python using the Jabberpy library. As mentioned earlier, the script will perform the following tasks:

• Connect to a predetermined Jabber server

• Join a predetermined conference room

• Sit there quietly, listening to the conversation

• Take simple commands from people to watch for, or stop watching for, particular words or phrases uttered in the room

• Relay the context of those words or phrases to whomever requested them, if heard

In addition to setting the identity of the Jabber server and the conference room in variables, we’ll also need to keep track of which users ask the assistant for words and phrases. We’ll use a dictionary (hash in Perl terms), as shown in Example 9-3, because we want to manage the data in there by key, the JID of those users that the script will be assisting. Having a look at what this dictionary will look like during the lifetime of this script will help us to visualize what we’re trying to achieve.

Example 9-3. Typical contents of the Keyword Assistant’s dictionary

{
  '[e-mail]/home':             {
                                            'http:': 1,
                                            'ftp:': 1
                                          },

  '[e-mail]/work':                {
                                            'Perl': 1,
                                            'Java': 1,
                                            'SAP R/3': 1
                                          },

  '[e-mail]/roscoe': {
                                            'dialback': 1
                                          }
}

We can see from the contents of the dictionary in Example 9-3 that three people have asked the script to look out for words and phrases. Two of those people—dj and piers—have interacted with the script directly by sending a normal (or ...