As a side project and a learning experience and ultimately, a good tool for my department, I started developing a simple jabber bot for our work's conference server, with the intention of making it capable of running specific commands and utilities. I realize there are other bots out there, but I thought this would be a good first python project for me. Most of my current scripts/utilities are in perl or php, so the OO world is a little new.
In any case, I wrote up a Bot class, got it to connect, join rooms, see chat, and the world rejoiced. Now, instead of writing a monolithic function for the message handler to deal with all the incoming text and all the possible cool things I could do with the bot like intranet lookups, dns checks, etc, I thought to myself: "self, wouldn't it be cool if you made a plugin framework that could read in a bunch of plugins and the bot could hand off the text to a plugin that was looking for that command and it could do the job". Then the smarter side of myself said "self, you have no frak'n idea how to do that". So I've been scouring this list for days, reading some of the past conversations. I investigated the trac component system, downloaded the source and tried my best to make heads ( or tails, take your pick ) of it. I looked at setuptools and eggs, I looked at Marty's simple framework at http://gulopine.gamemusic.org/2008/jan/10/simple-plugin-framework/ and I searched all over google for anything, even stuff that was non- python specific and just detailed plugin frameworks in theory ( I didn't find any good ones, so if you have some links, gimme. :) ) and I'm sorry say, but I still don't get it. While I understand half of it, I'm still not getting the point of using it for something like what I'm trying to accomplish. All this comes to my question - am I overcomplicating this project? I can understand the use of something like the trac component system if I had multiple components and plugins that handled different areas of my project and different points of interaction, but I don't. I've got exactly one spot where I want to check all my plugins and hand off the message to which ever ones are looking for that command. So really, should I even bother with trying to setup some framework for this or should I just be doing a simple loop over a directory, importing all the plugins and storing them in a list and then looping over them in the message handler to see which ones were looking for the command and letting them do their thing? I don't see the advantage I'd get from implementing something more complicated at this point. If you could show me the yellow brick road or offer any pointers, I'd appreciate it. I'm more than willing to go off reading more pages, but when the first 5 pages of a google search for 'plugin framework design' shows all purple, visited links and I'm still not getting it, I finally decided to turn here to the list and get some professional advice. As an aside, if there is anyone who is an experience developer and designer and is willing to take some private correspondence, please let me know. I feel embarrassed for asking, but I've got a alot of questions that I don't want to litter this list with and would rather voice them in private. Thanks, steve -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
