On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:10:53 -0700, Joe Strout <j...@strout.net> wrote:
I'm trying to make a simple AIM bot that, in addition to responding when I
talk to it, can also send me a message on its own initiative. My code is
based on SkippyTalkBot [1], but I confess that I don't understand it very
well, and though I've been crawling the Twisted documentation for a few days
now, it's still rather mysterious to me.
So I'm at a loss as to how to add an "idle" function that will allow my bot
to periodically see whether it has something new to say to the user.
While this sometimes makes sense, it's usually *not* the approach you want
to take. You're describing a solution which is essentially polling. And
polling is not as good as responding to events. You *could* run a function
ten times a second that looks around for a message to send and sends it if
it finds one. Or, whatever event occurs which creates those messages could
just send the message instead of putting it in a pile and waiting for your
poller to find it.
I can't tell you how to do this in detail, though, since I don't know what
causes you to have messages to send.
[snip]
Now, from trawling the docs, I guess that I want to call
reactor.callWhenRunning...
Probably not. If you want to run a function later (and that's how polling
is generally implemented), you want reactor.callLater. If you want to run
a function repeatedly at a fixed interval, twisted.internet.task.LoopingCall
will help.
but then I'd like to pass in a bound method of my
B class, so it can call sendMessage on myself. But I'm stumped as to how my
B class is even being instantiated, let alone how to get a reference to that
instance. And the callWhenRunning idea is only a wild guess and probably
wrong.
You'll probably encounter the same problem with reactor.callLater as you
were encountering with reactor.callWhenRunning, though. How do you get
a reference to the bound method to pass in? That's simple - don't call
the reactor method until you *have* an instance. You can call almost any
reactor method even *after* the reactor is started; you do not have to set
everything up before you call reactor.run.
You can read more about reactor.callLater in the scheduling howto:
http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/core/documentation/howto/time.html
Jean-Paul
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