Playing With Salesforce Bot Toolkit

On the Salesforce developer blog, they had a neat post: A Toolkit for Creating and Deploying Bots Inside Salesforce.  It is only a simple regular expression based bot, and I'm sure there are other Bot APIs out there, but the post seemed pretty inviting and looked fun, so I decided to take it for a spin.  It was every bit as fun as I thought.  I may port Zork over to this ☺

First installing and setting it up was pretty easy, just follow the post about it.  Works just like they described.  I think I fall in love when I tried out the select feature.  I could imagine all sorts of neat developer utilities put into that like run test and search the audit trail for who broke my stuff :)

Of course, you don't truly understand something until you hack at it, so I created a few simple Bot Handler.  Just look over the Handler apex classes for examples.  Of course, before I set off to re-create Zork, I did a simple one to create a task.  I did it two different ways to play with the framework.

MongoDB and Spring Boot - Easy as a Dream

I have a long history with SQL databases.  I've almost been tempted to write a basic one from scratch a few times for the fun of it.  But I haven't worked with a NoSQL database before.  With it raining outside, this seemed like a great day to give one a try.  Thus, I started looking into MongoDB.  I was prepared for this to take awhile, but this was like a dream.  I think I spent more time writing this blog post than it took to get going.