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Friday, June 4, 2010

Bots updated to v2 API

I've updated WorldCat-Bot and Yodaspeakify to v2 of the Wave API, which boasts some fantastic new features, including an easier way to do annotations, doing away with Cron, no need for a separate profile servlet, and the capabilities.xml is automatically generated for you using annotations.

One thing I voted for as an improvement was to use regular expressions in this method. I'm not sure what the author of the issue was talking about with iterating over Elements since, as I understand, these don't include text. The artifacts are still not on Google's repository and I'm getting pretty tired of a 5 minute commit time when I change some jars around.  I'm working on using Google Code as a repository and adding these artifacts after I mavenize them, then I'll create archetypes for Wave -- watch for an update on this soon, now that my bots are done this is the next project.

Some snags I ran into:
The .replace() of BlipContentRefs doesn't work the way you'd think it would. I thought I could do
BlipContentRefs content = blip.first(originalText).replace(newText);
But the BlipContentRefs will be empty. I got a hint for how to do this from wadrobotframework's BlipUtils:
public static void replaceBlipContent(Blip bleep, String nextContent) {
    BlipContentRefs bcr = bleep.all();
    if (bcr != null) {
        bcr.delete();
        bleep.append(nextContent);
    }
}
Thanks, wadael!

Another issue was when I used DocumentChangedEvent and then did a .getBlip() it would return a null Blip. My understanding of the JavaDoc was that it would return the root blip if no Blip was associated with that event, but this didn't seem to be happening. So, I opted for a BlipSubmittedEvent instead. Which, now that I think about it, is probably the desired behavior anyway.

Another issue was when I was trying to take advantage of the cool new filtering options. WorldCat-Bot used to surround it's searches with angle brackets (<>), but when I tried to filter on this
@Capability(filter = "<.*>")
@Override
public void onDocumentChanged(DocumentChangedEvent event) {
  ...
}
It didn't work because the capabilities.xml that was generated was not well formed. I also tried the escaped version
@Capability(filter = "&lt;.*&gt;")
@Override
public void onDocumentChanged(DocumentChangedEvent event) {
  ...
}
But this didn't work either, it looked for the entire literal not the unescaped form. I don't think this is currently possible to do, so I now use square brackets ([]) to filter on.

While trying to debug this, I set up logging (GAE supports JUL), but I learned it only logs things with INFO, WARN, and SEVERE levels (though I couldn't get INFO to work even with the logging.properties file with .level = ALL. Maybe something else is misconfigured).

But overall, the new API has been a very positive experience.

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