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App-Wubot-0.3.7
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NAME

App::Wubot::Guide::Overview - wtf is wubot?

DESCRIPTION

This project is still in the alpha stage of development! Data handling is reliable, but the user interface is still rough.

'wubot' is the code name for a distributed personal reactive automation tool I've been working on for the last several years. It is built in modern Perl 5 using Moose, AnyEvent, LWP::UserAgent, YAML, DBI, DBD::SQLite, Mojolicious, and many others.

The simplest way to think of this project is to compare it to email filters. Most email clients allow you to set rules to perform actions when a new email arrives.

This project allows you to have a set of monitors that collect data from a variety of sources, including:

  - email boxes
  - RSS/Atom feeds
  - IM
  - log files
  - system monitors
  - OS X idle time
  - local sunrise/sunset times
  - monitors running on remote hosts
  - your own custom monitor plugin written in perl

Data collected from each monitor is sent through a set of rules that can perform actions such as:

  - pop up an alert, e.g. using Growl
  - send a colorized message to stdout
  - store the message in a mailbox
  - add the message to a SQLite database
  - store data from the message in RRD and graph the data over time
  - add the message to outgoing RSS feeds
  - send a private or public message to IRC
  - forward the message to another host for further processing
  - your own custom action written in perl
  - ignore the message, the equivalent of routing it to /dev/null

Beyond just doing something with the message or portions of the message, you also have the option to modify the message, e.g.:

  - set a color to be used for notifications
  - transform some field in the message with a regexp
  - capture data from a field and store it in another field
  - strip images or HTML
  - fetch related content, e.g. fetch a complete article if the feed only provides a summary

Unlike previous generations of this project, the rules are entirely controlled by configuration. So it is not necessary to write any perl code to use the rules. In the future there will be a user interface for configuring the rules. See App::Wubot::Guide::Rules.

Rules can be nested, so that when a rule matches, it can cause additional sub-rules to run. Nesting rules makes the rules processing much more efficient so that not every rule needs to be run on every message. Rules processing is recursive so rules can be nested arbitrarily deep. For more information on rule conditions, see App::Wubot::Conditions.

Distributed operation currently relies on XMPP. Using XMPP, messages can be sent between wubot instances on multiple hosts. Monitors generate messages that may be reacted upon locally, and/or may be forwarded to other hosts for further reaction. See App::Wubot::Guide::MultipleBots.

This project is still under construction.

To get started, see App::Wubot::Guide::GettingStarted.

See also:

  - https://github.com/wu/wubot/raw/master/docs/img/wubot.png

REACTIVE AUTOMATION

I have struggled with a way to describe wubot in a sentence. Recently I have been calling it a personal distributed reactive automation tool.

By 'personal', I mean that it acts as a sort of personal assistant.

By 'distributed', I mean that it can run on multiple hosts, and that those hosts can communicate information about events by forwarding the event messages.

When I use the word 'reactor', I am not necessarily implying the 'Reactor pattern'.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactor_pattern

While it is possible to use this pattern in the wubot reactor plugins (as it is built on AnyEvent), it is not the main pattern that has been used so far. I have settled on using an ordered procedural rules tree as the primary reactive pattern because I find the behavior to be more understandable, predicatable, and deterministic, and it is more than sufficient to handle most of the cases in this problem domain.

I expect 'automation' is self-explanatory, but it really just means that wubot can take action based on the observed events. The automation extends from filtering out events that are not interesting to complex workflows that require executing external commands.

SEE ALSO

AtomsMasher: Personal Reactive Automation for the Web

    - http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16788/

Haystack: Research on Information Access, Analysis, Management, and Distribution

    - http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/

Esper: Complex Event Processing

    - http://esper.codehaus.org/

Atomate: an information assistance engine enabling end-user personal reactive automation for the web.

    - http://code.google.com/p/atomate/

If this then that, a mashup tool for the social web. When something happens (this) then do something else (that).

    - http://Ifttt.com/