14 November 2011

by Phil Christensen

mailto:phil@bubblehouse.org

A few weeks ago, GitHub released their internal bot tool, Hubot to the world, and everyone thought it was awesome. I thought it was nice in theory, but in practice using it was a pain. Here are the things I didn't like about Hubot that I'm trying to fix in TJ:

• Python Architecture — Node is a fascinating project, and I'm extremely excited by how it's exposing a whole generation of web programmers about asynchronous development. I'm also a fan of Javascript, at least when it's targeted towards a specific platform. Node is still in its infancy, though, and can't compare with the maturity of the libraries available for Python, particularly Twisted.

• Runs as Daemon — Hubot doesn't provide any functionality for daemonizing itself. Output doesn't contain timestamps, and the service doesn't save a pidfile. Check out this horrifying piece of bash to see what I had to go through to deal with hubot.

• "High-availability" — Chatbots seem to tend towards flaky code, but it's not acceptable for a poorly written plugin to crash the server. Neither should the bot get disconnected permanently due to transient server issues, like lost connections.

By selecting Twisted as a foundation for this project, I get a lot of stuff for free (daemon mode, logging improvements, plugin support, asynchronous multi- protocol support, etc.).

All code in this distribution is (C) Phil Christensen.

TJ is made available under the MIT/X Consortium license. The included LICENSE file describes this in detail.