Tech - Lets Chat

Instant messenger applications (like Yahoo Chat) have been around since the beginning of the web, but the web was initially bound by the desktop. With the emergence of mobile, messenger applications (like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger etc.) have seen a explosive rise. According to recent statistics, billions of messages are shared using these applications.

While these messages are largely between humans, technology cannot be far behind. The DevOps movement in the world of IT accelerated the move towards automation. Except perhaps design and coding, a lot of activities such as testing, integration, deployment etc. are becoming automated. One of the last vestiges of manual intervention was tasks like - monitoring, troubleshooting etc. Bots were created to automate these repetitive tasks too.

Diagram using iPad App - Paper
I decided to explore this world of Chat and Bots, also called by some as ChatBot. There are a few mature frameworks that can help build this capability. Core to this concept is a Bot (or the brain that responds to commands). To complement it, one needs a chat application too.

I chose the Hubot framework by Github to power the Bot. One needs to write the commands (that the bot responds to) using JavaScript or CoffeeScript. And, the Bot is connected to a RocketChat server. So, users can type in their requests/questions/commands in RocketChat and the bot will respond to them. RocketChat is open source and the mobile versions are also already freely available.

Both Hubot and RocketChat are deployed to Heroku public cloud in the free tier. Some basic commands have been written in Hubot. Schedulers have also been setup to ensure that the free tier usage is not exceeded.

The bot has been named very unimaginatively named as "myhubot". Any user can invoke the bot by using this name. So, a sample command would look like - "myhubot stock chart msft". The bot would call the Yahoo API to get the latest stock quote for Microsoft along the recent trend chart.

Here is an example of accessing the RocketChat from a desktop to get stock quotes and weather information. Yahoo API is used for the stock quote and Open Weather Map API (1000 free calls per month) for the weather commands.

RocketChat from a Desktop

RocketChat mobile application is configured to the RocketChat server URL. The same bot commands can be now run from both desktop and mobile.


RocketChat from iPhone

All it took was a few days to pull everything together, primarily because Hubot is an easy framework to use. Cloud providers like Heroku and others provide a free tier to deploy and test the application, at least as a hobby. Lastly, RocketChat is an impressive open source chat application.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cloudera Quick Start VM in Hyper-V

Image
Overview Marc Andreessen penned his now famous essay, “ Why Software Is Eating the World ” in Wall Street Journal in 2011. However, if we dig under the covers, it's really virtualization that is powering this phenomenon. Today, literally every hardware component such as - processor, memory, network, storage, network load-balancer, network router and switch, firewall are virtualized. In fact, even a user is now "virtualized" especially in scenarios such as load testing and synthetic monitoring. Finally, as a concept, money is also virtualized in the form of crypto-currencies. In this post, let's go through how we can implement virtualization in a local machine and get better understanding of the concepts of virtualization.  Virtualization  One key aspect, driver and benefit of virtualization is sharing of the physical resources.  Before we dive in, let's define some concepts. Host Machine - This can be a server rack, single server or a desktop/lapto
Read more

Book Review - The Price of Being Fair

Image
Overview  As the FairPrice group in Singapore completes 50 years, "The Price of Being Fair" book is a timely story of it's birth and evolution. The book has been authored by Sue-Ann Chia and Shing Huei Peh. While being true to history, the book has nuggets of "behind the scenes" information, given the time the authors have spent with various leaders at FairPrice. The book is already a best seller according to Kinokuniya book store. At under 200 pages, it makes for a breezy read. The Usual Suspects Having worked in retail industry for over two decades, the travails of  NTUC FairPrice seem familiar to me. A retail CEO once remarked that retail is a pretty "public" industry. There is not much behind which a retail business can hide. As such, retailers often have to follow the aspirations and concerns of the communities and customers they serve. The journey of FairPrice from being an EDLP (everyday low price) retailer to one having multiple formats, busin
Read more

Azure Chronicles - VM Security

Using the cloud has many benefits, some of them such as elasticity and scalability. On the other hand, some other aspects such as security and cost need to be paid attention to. Let's look at the security aspect in this post. Lynis is one of the most popular Linux auditing and hardening tools. It has community and enterprise editions. As an example, the community edition is being used here. Let's scan a Linux based VM in Azure and find out the results. This post assumes that you have an existing subscription in Microsoft Azure. The below steps show how to scan a VM in Azure. A new class of VM's called B1ls was launched. These VM's are quite small and cheap. As this is just an experiment, let's try this new VM. Create a B1ls VM with the Ubunto 18.04 LTS image on it. Make sure that the VM has a public IP address and use a public key for access. Once the VM is created, login to the VM using a tool such as Putty. Follow the steps described here to ins
Read more