ESME as Chat+ in OfBiz

General Use case

(Taken from comments from original page)

1.  a new user visits the ecommerce site
2. this new user enters a microblog message with a question to the administrator of the site.
3. One of the system administrators answers the microblog question as quick as possible
4. further conversation follows.

.Technical Prequisites

Technical Description

1. Messages are post in ESME
2. ESME sends message to Akibot via HTTP POST
3. Akibot acknowledges the message reception by responding the HTTP POST call with an XML response
4. Akibot store the message and processes it through its Contextual Analyzer (C>A) module
5. If necessary, Akibot makes inquiries the corresponding enterprise (ERP or Groupware) application via HTTP REQUEST
6. The enterprise application processes the inquiry
7. The enterprise application responds to the inquiry with an XML response
8. Akibot processes the enterprise application response with its Directive Processor (DP), which decides if any action is to be taken
9. If Akibot decides that an action needs to be taken (for now, just sending back a message to the microblog) it does so by sending the message via HTTP POST call to ESME
10. (Optional) ESME can send back an acknowledge to Akibot letting it know that the message was successfully received

Integration analysis: ESME Action

Use ESME's existing action architecture to post to akibot via its HTTP POST interface.

We can post to twitter via this mechanism so should also be able to post to you guys as well.

For example,

http://user:password@identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml
status=%s

The Akibot REST API to send messages has the following parameters:

We just have to map our parameters to these values.

Iterations

1. Use existing akibot infrastructure and attempt to use ESME's action mechanism to post to akibot's REST API
2. Start changing akibot infrastructure (contextual analyzer, etc) to be more ESME-specific

Questions

1. What sort of back-end system are we talking about? Are you already using a system that we can re-use for initial tests?
2. We also have to agree on what sort of message contents (formats, etc.) will be used Are there special words (invoice, etc.) that are necessary. This is, of course, linked to what sort of back-end you guys are using.
3. What sort of rules are present in the DP? The obvious one would be to create an ESME message.
4. Regarding 10, we do respond with a XML response to those submitting messages via REST API
5. Do you want to use the old REST API or the new "Streaming API" (Ethan's baby :->)?
6. We just probably use a POST action as Ethan suggests as a first step
7. You are right about the messaging threads needing standardization (especially 2 and 9). Maybe you can look at my table in the wiki page and tell me about what the parameters mean and whether they are optional or not. We will have to map them to our fields.
8. We also have to think about user-ids. Do they need to be synchronized? Probably....