AIML: Progress of a sort

So I played around with the Aurora NPC code trying to implement the AIML code. I didn't really come to any firm conclusions and have more questions than answers or results, so this post is more of a ramble more than anything else or in other words, I'm collecting my thoughts and dumping them out as an unparsed stream here...

Some observations are that Ken's code (found here): http://kennethrougeau.com/geekery/opensim-server-side-npc-experiments-day-three/

is actually client side code which hooks up with the website pandorabots. Ken explains it better than I do on the page but the gist of it is you sign up for a pandorabot, get an ID for it (which is generated by the site) then you send your text which you commented to the NPC bot to the web site via an LSL httprequest post and get a request back which you then parse and call the NPC say command with the result. Though it's functional the drawback is you need a prim for each bot with a listening script in it. Don't like that too much to be honest.

The way Radegast does it is much cleaner: the radegast bot itself listens and then calls the AIMLbot code which is on sourceforge. Problem is: it's *seriously* complicated. I was looking for something which would be basically *call this* *send this back*. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything like that on the first hack attempt. Basically my head exploded. So the interrim step is to get Ken's LSL client code working with the aurora bots for now kind of as a proof of concept. Then I'll try to dig deeper into radegast or else ask Khalifa. I believe I've seen his sig on the aurora-dev channel so who knows, he might answer enough to be able to push it ahead.

Unanswered questions: if I were to implement some kind of mash-up whereby I get the radegast listen code to work but instead of being able to implement an AIML parse, I instead server-side code up some httpRequests and Responses, far as I know they are synchronous calls. So if I send an HTTP POST request up to a website, will the region code just hang there until the response comes back? That would be kind of ugly. There ought to be an asynchronous call. But unfortunately my .net coding skillz aren't up to speed on that kind of thing so it might not be the best. In an ideal world, the AIMLBot guy would explain how to parse the AIML so I didn't need to futz around with httprequest etc and could just use AIML directly. On the other hand, I could do a metric ton of reading about how AIML works and just code something up myself....

Anyways. Onwards....