Voxeo Developers Corner

As you may have noticed last week, we announced the acquisition of a company called IMified and with that we brought in more opportunities and options for developers. Now you can create instant messaging “bots” (or “agents” or whatever you want to call them) that allow you to create applications that interact with users via IM. (More about what you can do with IMified in the acquisition announcement.)

Developer accounts are free over on www.imified.com. Please do sign up and check it out. We’d love to hear what you think of the service. (And you can safely assume that we’ll be evolving the service and adding more to it over the months ahead.)

One aspect of IMified that is a bit different from either Voxeo’s Evolution XML developer portal or our Tropo.com site is that with IMified you do need to host your application on a web server somewhere. With both Evolution and Tropo, you can host your application on your own server and simply point Evolution or Tropo to the URL of your app, but there is also the option with both services of hosting your apps directly within our hosted infrastructure. With IMified you do need to host your application somewhere and then provide the URL inside IMified when configuring your bot.

The beautiful thing about this, of course, is that it means you can write the bot application in whatever language you want on whatever operating system you want and using whatever tools you want. All your application has to do is use the IMified API to communicate with the IMified platform.

One place developers can host a web services app these days is certainly Google App Engine, and the IMified team just posted a knowledge base article showing an example bot in python hosted on Google App Engine. Courtesy of an IMified user named Barry, the source code is available in the IMified knowledge base. The IMified team notes that it’s also a good example of performing HTTP Authentication in python.

(And rather than include the source code here, I’ll just point you over to the IMified site.)

We’re excited about adding IMified to the Voxeo family of services and we’re definitely looking forward to seeing what people develop on the platform.

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: im, imified, google, googleappengine, gae, python, voxeo

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.