Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 121 Location: Richmond, VA
Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 3:37 pm Post subject:
Yet another one of the many simple services I am working on. Hopefully soon you'll see a nice list on Botwork.com.
Send it the name of a city and state, state and country, zip code, or anything Weather Underground can handle and it will return the weather conditions in plain text.
Not knocking your work, thomas...but nearly every one of the services you are posting are already some pretty common commands used in a large majority of bots. Until I see something unique and not just some command turned into a service, I doubt I'll use any of it. _________________ Check out Botworld! A dev resource for things bot.
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Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Posts: 556 Location: Los Angeles, CA votes: 1
Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:23 pm Post subject:
To use the service i have to do an LWP call to your server, and parse the data, then your server does a call, and then a parse. why not leave you out and to the call myself. You should post the code for the command instead of services. _________________ [ matt ]
Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 2292 Location: Colorado
Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:31 pm Post subject:
QUOTE(mattaustin @ Nov 3 2004, 01:23 PM)
To use the service i have to do an LWP call to your server, and parse the data, then your server does a call, and then a parse. why not leave you out and to the call myself. You should post the code for the command instead of services.
That defeats the whole purpose of the service. Besides if his service feilds all the calls then if he finds new sources of weather you win automagicaly. If he starts caches frequently requested ones you get an immediat speed bonus. The whole idea of a service is to decentralize the work. Maybe he doesn't make a call to a website for every request, maybe it remembers everything its gone out and gotten before. His dictionary command could include definitions from 5 dictionaries and you get that for the price of one LWP call. You could write a service wrapper that caches responses from services so that you don't even incur the cost of the fetch unless its been a while or you've never gotten that service before.
The spirit of services is to provide a decentralized source of data to applications. You make a bot, you probably want to focus your energy on that bots interaction with users not the collecting of the data. So let someone who wants to write a service do it for you. Now I'm not opposed to seeing his code so that others code mirror his service. That would provide redundancy and allow us to critique his code, hopefully improving it for everyones benifit. _________________ Eric256
Proud previous owner and current admin of Bot-depot.com
Sure, some of the more simple services, like mine or thomas' can be done inside your own code and it seems pointless to "one off" them. But this is just the beginning. Think about services that deal with large amounts of data or those that involve more complicated code, most bot developers won't be able to install those as commands, nor will they want to. Take all the data thomas has for his Trivia bot - over a quarter million questions/answers. Do you really want to have all that data duplicated on your server? Why not just use a service that thomas posts?
Services will make it easier for all bots to have access to more content and functionality. Why would anyone want to install all of that functionality directly in their bot? Besides, with services your bot automatically, with no extra coding, will have access to all new services. Can't beat that.
So hopefully thomas keeps cranking them out. And I'm going to start opening up more of my data and code as services. Eventually I (with Cougar) or Thomas or Eric will release a bot that uses nothing but services and you'll see how simple it all is.
Joined: 19 Jul 2004 Posts: 556 Location: Los Angeles, CA votes: 1
Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:42 pm Post subject:
Ok i see it on large files or if the server is cacheing..., but now your dependent on the service host.. so if there down all you commands dont work where if i connect dirrectly to a weather service provider..and it's down only my weather command is down. _________________ [ matt ]
With services, you can expect that their will be competitors. So there could be dozens of weather services, either competitors or mirrors of Thomas' service. The way I have BotWork designed, if you make a request for a weather service, it will give you the mirrors and you can switch over to one that IS working if your current one isn't.
I like the idea of services...but I'm not seeing anything very unique in thomas'. Didn't botwork once have some files for running a service or was I imagining things? I was curious to how it worked, I'm assuming it's just a basic cgi script? _________________ Check out Botworld! A dev resource for things bot.
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http://botworld.marzopolis.com
Botwork started out with XML services almost 2 years ago - wow! But other than Thomas and Eric and me, nobody could be "bothered" (meaning spend the time to learn something new and useful) with XML. So it kind of fizzled. More recently, I decided to start doing "simple" services, plain text in, plain text out, in the hopes of getting a few more people interested and involved. XML services are much more powerful and follow a standard. And I'm being talked into reviving them, which will be easy, because all of the code is there.
And yes, there are modules that wrap all the XML stuff up, so that someone who uses Botwork services doesn't have to know XML, instead they just use a simple module and API.
So, for now, I'm going to revive XML services and make it easy to add both simple and XML services to Botwork. Note that Botwork is a protocol, but also would act as a registry for services, sort of like a search engine for services. But importantly, anybody can create and run their own registry. There doesn't have to be one central service registry at Botwork.
Joined: 22 Feb 2004 Posts: 121 Location: Richmond, VA
Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:08 am Post subject:
QUOTE(alienz @ Nov 3 2004, 01:19 PM)
Not knocking your work, thomas...but nearly every one of the services you are posting are already some pretty common commands used in a large majority of bots. Until I see something unique and not just some command turned into a service, I doubt I'll use any of it.
Not knocking your post, but my service is way better than any command you might crank out. Not only have I been creating commands and bot services for YEARS, if something ever changes to make these services not work they will be fixed as fast as I can fix them, w/o anything done by you. All the services I provide may be easy for you to produce yourself, but do you have the support of me to fix them if something goes wrong? No.
Also, this is way easier for the first time bot developer. He doesn't know anything about perl bots or the like, but he can probably figure out how to...
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use LWP::Simple; my $response = get "http://www.thomashp.com/bw/weather.cgi=direct=$input"; return $response;
If I was running a command based bot I would definitely use bot services. I'm sure I would have to keep a close eye on them to make sure they always worked 100%, but that's the same with any command I would write, and instead of the support relying on me, it would be on the service creator, which would probably know quite a bit about the service he created and be able to fix it instantly.
In addition to that, I know some of the services I have created you might already have as commands, and that's fine. I'm sure someone will find use for them. I don't rely on you approval. Keep in mind these are just kinda showing how simple services work and future services will probably provide much more useful data.
Not knocking your post, but my service is way better than any command you might crank out
Lets see, I give you some constructive criticism, and you insult my intelligence and coding ability. Great way to get people to warm up to your idea.
I've been doing this for years myself. You don't know me, so how could you possibly think you know what I'm capable of? Not to mention you're actually boasting over a service that gets the weather. Gee, that's original.
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but do you have the support of me to fix them if something goes wrong? No
Why would I want to rely on you?
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and instead of the support relying on me, it would be on the service creator, which would probably know quite a bit about the service he created and be able to fix it instantly.
The only person I've seen that runs services with any amount of knowledge is mojave. Some others who've tried doing services left alot to be desired.
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I don't rely on you approval.
You wouldnt be posting here if you werent looking for approval.
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future services will probably provide much more useful data.
I'll be more interested when you show something worthwhile instead of just copying commands into services. Kudos on the Yoda one though. _________________ Check out Botworld! A dev resource for things bot.
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Posted: Thu Nov 04, 2004 4:18 am Post subject: 