One of the most powerful features of ESME are the so-called actions which allow users to individually respond to certain event types (previously primarily associated with message contents) . For example, you could send yourself an email when messages with a certain tag were created. Well, Vassil Dichev has finally merged his new actions into the main development trunk and there are some cool new features. What Vassil has done is to look at other types of microblogging events (those that aren’t necessarily associated with messages) and has created “hooks” so that users can respond to them.
Here are a few examples:
| login | Selects the messages generated on user login. | |
| follow | Selects the messages generated when a user follows you. | %f expands to follower nickname |
| unfollow | Selects the messages generated when a user unfollows you. | %f expands to ex-follower nickname |
| profile | Selects the messages generated when your profile is changed. | |
| every number mins | Generates messages at regular intervals and selects them. | The message is not saved- too noisy, plus two identical tests never refer to the same event |
Vassil also added other functionality to the “http” action so that it is now possible to create twitter and identi.ca messages as well via actions. I’ve tried it and it is pretty awesome. Here is how it is done:
http://[User]:[password]@identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml status=%s
(Make sure that "status=%" is on a new line)
The idea was to look at microblogging tools that supply functionality that is missing in Twitter and embed this provided functionality in ESME in the form of actions. Therefore, it wouldn’t be necessary to have additional tools but users could have everything in one place.
The full description of the new functionality is present in the Apache wiki .
We are currently playing with ideas regarding a plug-in architecture so that others could also develop actions.
Every week, we deployed the latest version of ESME on our server in the Stax cloud. If you want to play with the actions yourself, you can login to that server and test the actions out.
Note: Please be aware that this server has a version of ESME that reflects the latest code base. Since some things are still being developed, certain functionality will not work. For example, the current release after our code restructure still can’t display actual messages and the UI is horrible. This should all change in the next few weeks.
If you have ideas for new actions, then feel free to add a feature request at our Apache Jira site.
