Venture Geek

It has been a while since I wrote code professionally. I try to get my hands dirty once in a while mostly just to play with new techniques or new features, but I haven’t created any substantial code in a few years. The other night I started noodling around with the Jabber gateway in ColdFusion (a product I have used since its very earliest days over 10 years ago — my how time flies), and I hacked together something that might be of interest to others. So, I gave it a name, slapped an open source license on it (Apache License, Version 2.0 in this case), and put it “out there” for the world to see.

I call it SLIMBot — it’s a package that makes it easy to create an IM buddy (currently tested only with Google Talk, but it should work with any jabber service or the other IM services through a 3rd party XMPP gateway) that accepts “commands”. For instance, the sample commands I built are things like “weather” and “stockquote” — the one I actually find myself using on my test instance is the command “domain” that lets me check if a domain name is available and, if so, gives me a link to register it (or, if not, a link to see WHOIS information).

But, the idea is that people can use this to build out their own commands without needing to worry much about how all the bits and pieces fit together. For folks used to coding in CFML and creating components, it should be a snap.

Anyway, if you happen to be a ColdFusion developer and want to try it out you can grab the source at http://slimbot.riaforge.org. I must say it has been fun to write something that is more than a throw-away script, though I don’t think I’d want to go back to doing it every day. If I get ambitious, I want to create an IM-based “conference call” system where you can join private chats with groups of people by signing on with a code rather than needing to invite people in.

Once I get another iteration or two done I’ll set up a more public demo of it — any ideas for things you’d want an IM Bot to do for you?