Basically, Hubot as a library.

stdbot aims to provide a universal API for bots to interact with chat rooms, via a number of adapters.

• IRC
• Slack
• Flowdock

npm install --save stdbot
npm install --save stdbot-flowdock # Use the adapter of your choice

const Stdbot = require('stdbot')
const Flowdock = require('stdbot-flowdock')

const bot = Stdbot(Flowdock({
  token: 'my-token',
  flows: ['main']
}))

Tweak the code with the adapter of your choice, and its specific options (documented in the adapter readme).

The bot object is an EventEmitter.

• All errors are sent through the error event.
• You can listen for message events.

See objects for message format.

• send a message in the context of another message (for example, same thread).
• reply to a message, mentioning its author.
• edit a message you sent.
• messageRoom to send a message to a room without context.

Each of these methods return a promise yielding the message object representing the message you sent.

• mention an user in the adapter format (for example prefixing its name by a @.
• address a message to an user for example by mentioning them and adding a suffix like , or : .
• mentions to get the list of users mentioned in a message.
• isMentioned to tell if a user is mentioned in a message.
• end the stream to stop listening.

bot.on('message', message => {
  // Send a message in the same thread
  message.send(`Hello, ${bot.mention(message.author)}!`)
  // bot.send(message, `Hello, ${bot.mention(message.author)}!`)

  // Same, but mention the message author
  message.reply(`Hello, ${bot.mention(message.author)}!`)
  // bot.reply(message, `Hello, ${bot.mention(message.author)}!`)

  // Edit your own message (if supported by adapter)
  message.send(`Hello, ${bot.mention(message.author)}!`)
    .then(myMessage => myMessage.edit(bot.address(message.author, 'Hello!')))
    // .then(myMessage => bot.edit(myMessage, bot.address(message.author, 'Hello!')))
    .then(myEditedMessage => {})
})

// Send a message in a room
bot.messageRoom('main', 'Hello, world!')

Object structure is strongly inspired by Schema.org naming, especially Person for users and EmailMessage for messages.

Some adapters may provide other information, like fullName, email, image, url.

The main reason to not use Hubot in some cases is because Hubot and its adapters can hardly be used as a library. Neither Hubot nor its adapters are meant to be required by third party code:

• Hubot and its adapters require CoffeeScript to run, and the code is not precompiled to JavaScript, requiring you to run your whole project through CoffeeScript if you want to require it.
• Hubot will take ownership of the whole console output and process error handling, which is not suitable when used as a library.
• Hubot adapters can't be used standalone because they depend completely on the Hubot environment.

This is okay, since Hubot is not a library, and its adapters are not designed for portability. stdbot is an alternative that you can use in your own applications, instead of having your scripts be executed inside Hubot.

• Switch, similar project, built around RxJS. Unlike stdbot, switch aims to be exhaustive in the events and features exposed by the adapter, while stdbot is more like a common denominator between supported adapters, with a simple but limited feature set.