Sunday, August 23, 2009

The progress of cringer

So, in my last post, I talked about cringer, the gajaxapis-irc-bot that I'm working on. In the month+ since I posted that, cringer has gone from a concept to a functional, if still experimental, bot which utilizes the Google AJAX Search and Language APIs to provide useful functionality in the #googleajaxapis channel on irc.freenode.net . It has also been infused with the ability to make snide remarks about things like MSIE and Flash/Flex. And it has a help facility which allows users to utilize its different resources (and find interesting tidbits about several regulars to the channel).

To be certain, cringer has developed quite nicely, thanks in large part to the ideas shared by friends and colleagues in the channel. But one thing has eluded me thus far. I have found myself unable to implement the ability to evaluate Javascript in the channel via either SpiderMonkey or (as one of the Googlers in the channel suggested) V8. Now, this is undoubtedly due in large part to the fact that I've never attempted to compile one of these JS engines independently before. So this week, as I have opportunity, installing at least one of them - probably SpiderMonkey - on my Mac will consume my idle time. If anyone has any insights, please don't hesitate to send them!