
Make your own IM bot in Ruby, and interface it with your Rails app - nickb
http://rubypond.com/articles/2008/06/26/make-your-own-im-bot-in-ruby-and-interface-it-with-your-rails-app/
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tptacek
You can do better than that.

Two things:

Erin's been working on a Campfire bot for us; one of our major problems is
getting everyone on the team to use Campfire consistently, so her bot notices
when people are absent and then tracks them down on AIM and yells at them with
a link. The AIM part was pretty trivial; she's using the (horrible) TOC
libraries that come with Ruby.

Also, Rails interfaces best by way of the database. You can write Rails apps
without ActiveRecord, but you lose a lot of the integration that makes Rails
nice to use. Scaling database writes from an IM bot can get tricky. On a dare
a few weeks ago, I wrote an async MySQL driver for EventMachine --- you can
drive an arbitrary number of queries to an arbitrary number of MySQL servers
from a single thread. EventMachine + Async MySQL + Async AIM/TOC = arbitrarily
scalable IM driven Rails app.

<http://github.com/tqbf/asymy/tree/master>

It needs some love.

