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Beyond the Limits
IRC Bots: Easy!
Issue: 2.5 (May/June 2004)
Author: Didier Barbas
Author Bio: Didier has been a dilettante programmer for more than 20 years. Unusual for a Frenchman, he speaks 11 languages, including Korean and PowerPC machine-language.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 6,443
Starting Page Number: 46
RBD Number: 2523
Resource File(s):
2523.sit Updated: Friday, May 14, 2004 at 10:01 AM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
IRC has traditionally been on the geek side of online chatting. Somehow, it brought BBS chat rooms of old back to the Net. Its protocol is quite easy to implement, and creating a channel (a chat room) doesn't require much; but this simplicity has its own backdraws. Once you're inside a channel, the only thing you can do is chat; there are no extra features, and no administration beyond what the channel's server provides.. So, people started building bots. Not the evil kind that spiders through channels and spreads spam, but a very static and obedient kind of majordomo that'll keep watch on the channel, accept commands, log conversations and/or links, do Google searches for you, and much more. These bots are often written in the web's scripting languages, mainly Perl and Python (I, too, wrote one in Python, sigh...), but there's no compelling reason why we couldn't write one in RB, especially in the light of new versions of RB compiling for Linux.
The (REAL)Basics
We will write an RBot class that'll provide all core services: connection to an IRC server and channel, parsing of the messages, logging of the URLs, Google search, and, of course, a framework for plugins so that we can extend our bot's functionalities.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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