#ultimateq

An irc bot written in Go.

ultimateq is designed as a distributed irc bot framework. Where a bot can be just one file, or a collection of extensions running alongside the bot. A key feature in this bot is that the extensions are actually processes themselves which will connect to a bot, or allow bots to connect to them via unix or tcp sockets using RPC mechanisms to communicate.

There are two advantages behind this model. One is that several bots can use a single extension. This has advantages if the extension is holding a database meant to be shared (although for scalability you might consider database level scaling with replication, but this is just an example).

The other advantage is that the bot has failure isolation. Because each extension is running in it's own process, even a fatal and unrecoverable crash in an extension means nothing to the bot. This adds a resilency to this bot that not many other bots share.

Here's a sample taste of what the bot api might look like for some do-nothing connection to an irc server.

import bot "github.com/aarondl/ultimateq"
func main() {
  bot.Nick("mybot").Channels("#C++").Run()
}

##Packages

###bot This package ties all the low level plumbing together, using this package's helpers it should be easy to create a bot and deploy him into the dying world of irc.

###irc This package houses the common irc constants and types necessary throughout the bot. It's supposed to remain a small and dependency-less package that all packages can utilize.

###config Config package is used to present a fluent style configuration builder for an irc bot. It also provides some validation, and file reading/writing.

###parse This package deals with parsing irc protocols. It is able to consume irc protocol messages using the Parse method, returning the common IrcMessage type from the irc package.

###dispatch Dispatch package is meant to register callbacks and dispatch IrcMessages onto them in an asynchronous method. It also presents many handler types that will be easy to use for bot-writers.

###inet Implements the actual connection to an irc server, handles buffering, \r\n splitting and appending, and logarithmic write-speed throttling.

###extension This package defines helpers to create an extension for the bot. It should expose a way to connect/allow connections to the bot via TCP or Unix socket. And have simple helpers for some network RPC mechanism.

###data This package holds data for irc based services. It supplies information about channels, and users that the bot is aware of.

Persistence may need some attention. Does this bot have built-in user levels and modes for users? Does it have arbitrary key-value store for extensions? How do extensions keep this data up to date? Will they have their own copy of the data or do they need to query the data on the master bot all the time?