Platforms#
A chatbot has to interact with the users through some communication channel. BBF’s platforms wrap all the necessary code to build the connection between the bot and a communication channel.
All platforms implement the abstract class Platform
. It defines the methods any
platform must have. So, if you would like to create your own platform (and contribute to the BBF
development 🙂), it must implement them according to the platform needs:
initialize()
: Initialize the platform. It is called internally when you run the bot (Bot.run()
). You may need to set some things previously to the platform execution.start()
: Start the platform execution. It is called internally when you run the bot (Bot.run()
).stop()
: Stop the platform. It is called internally when you stop the bot (Bot.stop()
)._send()
: Send a payload (usually a message) to the user. This is a private method. It is called internally by other platform methods, such as the following one.reply()
: Send a textual message to the user.
Additionally, a platform could have specific methods for it, as you can see in our implemented platforms.