UPDATE: Looks like bitbucket is having some issues, see my local repository if you’d like to browse or clone the code.

JabberCat is a jabber bot that can be fed messages via HTTP to enable scripts and other processes the ability to communicate via Jabber. Communicating via JabberCat is meant to be language agnostic. If your favorite language has an HTTP library(as most do), you won’t need to understand jabber to get your messages to a jabber chat or user.

This project started out as nothing more than vaporware, incubating in the brain of a fellow Pythonista named Mike Pirnat. It materialized shortly after Mike presented a talk at ClePy about ideas he had that never came to life.

JabberCat is ideal for plugging into your continuous integration environment to broadcast statistics(code coverage, etc), or even statistics/events/alerts within your network.

Currently there are two tools for passing messages to JabberCat. A web interface, and a command line tool. The web interface allows you to post messages from your browser. The command line client is ideal for piping messages to, like a few lines of a log file, or source code.

JabberCat has SSL support, but it seems to be a bit buggy at the moment due to it dropping connections unexpectedly. There are plans in the works to implement some new features and spruce up the web interface.

Currently the software is very green (read: alpha), and is not recommended for any kind of production use. You should help this project get some traction, really. Why not hop over to Bitbucket and clone/fork the main repository?

JabberCat on Bitbucket: http://bitbucket.org/benjaminws/jabbercat/

JabberCat is written in Python and is comprised of the following components:

• jabberpy patched up to work with 2.6, distributed with JabberCat
• web.py
• Jinja2
• Nose for unit tests
• Dingus for Mocking

If you think this software could be useful to you, and would like to see it evolve, please don’t hesitate to submit patches or enhancement ideas. You could also fork the repository or report issues on the issue tracker

I have submitted a talk to CodeMash to speak about JabberCat, hopefully it will be accepted! I plan on having a polished stable release by then :)

Thanks for reading!

Note: Image credit goes to Dan Buch