In case you don't know what cringer is, it's an IRC bot designed to utilize Google's AJAX APIs (well, the RESTful side of them, anyway) and various other interfaces to provide a valuable resource for the #googleajaxapis channel on Freenode. In addition, the code can be easily adapted to provide similar resources for other channels. In fact, in recent weeks, it's been deployed in the #lilypond channel (also on Freenode) with some interesting tweaks under the name fringer.
So here we go with a few tidbits. First, after a botched upgrade to Snow Leopard, I ended up with an opportunity to rewrite cringer from scratch. I say opportunity because, even before the upgrade, I had been thinking about a number of significant improvements which would streamline the code and dramatically increase functionality, flexibility, and stability.
So second, cringer2 is now online and running. cringer2 is a complete rewrite and introduces a modular design. To add functionality, you have only to write a simple Perl module, drop it into the proper folder, and restart cringer. I have contemplated dynamic loading of modules, but I am leery of the security risk that this could entail (i.e., strange people loading arbitrary modules and causing trouble, etc.). Even with this limitation, adding functionality is dramatically simplified.
Third, among the modules for cringer2, I have included a number of functionality improvements. Thus far, the modules I have built and deployed are search (for use with the Google Search API), fetchfeed (for use with the Google Feeds API), smartalleck (for making obnoxious comments), translate (for use with the Google Language API), weather (utilizes the Yahoo! Weather RSS feeds to provide current conditions and forecast details for a given locale), and twittersearch (for use with the Twitter Search API). In addition to these, I intend to develop and deploy a yspell module (for use with the Yahoo! Spelling API), and I will contemplate a buzz module which will utilize the Buzz API to search Google Buzz posts.
Fourth, it is still my intention to develop and deploy a module which will eval simple Javascript code and return the results. However, I continue to be plagued by the security ramifications of such functionality. In addition, I am having a difficult time deciding which JS engine I want to use. OSX includes an interface to Safari's engine which is really very good, but I can't guarantee that the code will be cross-platform that way. Alternatively, I could install TraceMonkey or something like that, but that has proved to be something of a hassle.
And finally, I have posted both cringer1 and cringer2 code to the Google Code project. You can check it out at http://code.google.com/p/gajaxapis-irc-bot! Feel free to download the code and tinker with it, as long as you don't forget to share your improvements with everyone else!
Over the next several weeks, I intend to get the additional modules mentioned above up and running, but I also intend to allocate a box which will be dedicated to cringer and a couple other projects in the hopes of improving performance, up-time (as opposed to running on my laptop which is off at nights), and security for my personal system.
So that's all for now.
