Remote-control your Slack bots with JSON (2016)

Update: As a mistake I timestamped this as 2016, but this post was just freshly published on January 17th of 2017. Sorry for the confusion! :D

A couple of days ago, @shaunymca shared a really cool project on our slack channel.

If you think about it, this is a pretty refreshing idea. Basically, it's a mobile app for remote-controlling a Slack bot.

To declare that you've started brewing coffee, open the app, and simply touch the button from the cell with your name

And in 12 minutes,

And the cool part is, this was built with Jasonette, so he didn't need to write any native code.

First, he wrote an express.js server which returns a JSON markup.

Then he connected it to Jasonette, which turned that JSON markup into a native app which drew the UI as well as sent requests to the server upon user input.

And voila! We have a remote control app for Slack bots.

Check out the repo here: https://github.com/shaunymca/coffeeapp

Demo

I thought it was really cool so just decided to fork and try it out on our own slack channel. Here's how it works:

When the Jasonette app hits the home url, the server returns a JSON markup that looks like this:

Then, Jasonette turns it into a native app that looks like this:

iOSAndroid

So how does it work behind the scenes? Each cell item is represented by a JSON object in the markup, which has an action attribute that looks like this:

{"type":"$network.request","options":{"url":"https://evening-inlet-32428.herokuapp.com/submit.json","method":"POST","data":{"user_name":"{{name}}","user_id":"{{id}}"}}}

When you tap on a cell, it makes a POST request to the submit.json endpoint, which triggers the Slack API.

And in 12 minutes, your Slack channel will get a notification from the Coffee bot!.

TLDR

1. The express server returns a JSON markup, which becomes a native app when you connect it with Jasonette.
2. When you tap an item from the app, it triggers a POST request to the server.
3. The server waits 12 minutes, and then triggers the Slack API with credentials to post to the Slack channel.

Conclusion

This reminded me of the Yo app, since it's meant to only serve a single purpose.

It's like a bot version of Yo. But for multiplayer. And powered by Slack!

It's awesome to see these creative projects being built with Jasonette. Feel free to reach out if you built something cool using Jasonette. I will try to showcase them on the blog.

Lastly, make sure to try out @shaunymca's coffeebot app for your own slack channel! It's so cool! https://github.com/shaunymca/coffeeapp.