David Moreno: WIP: Perl bindings for Facebook Messenger

A couple of weeks ago I started looking into wrapping the Facebook Messenger API into Perl. Since all the calls are extremely simple using a REST API, I thought it could be easier and simpler even, to provide a small framework to hook bots using PSGI/Plack.

So I started putting some things together and with a very simple interface you could do a lot:

usestrict;
usewarnings;
useFacebook::Messenger::Bot;

my $bot = Facebook::Messenger::Bot->new({
    access_token   => '...',
    app_secret     => '...',
    verify_token   => '...'
});

$bot->register_hook_for('message', sub {
    my $bot = shift;
    my $message = shift;

    my $res = $bot->deliver({
        recipient => $message->sender,
        message => { text => "You said: " . $message->text() }
    });
    ...
});

$bot->spin();

You can hook a script like that as a .psgi file and plug it in to whatever you want.

Once you have some more decent user flow and whatnot, you can build something like:

…using a simple script like this one.

The work is not finished and not yet CPAN-ready but I’m posting this in case someone wants to join me in this mini-project or have suggestions, the work in progress is here.

Thanks!