Service vs extension about program-y HOT 2 CLOSED

Hey Sean,

As you say extensions are late binding, only called when the grammar resolves to an tag, but they also provide the greatest amount of flexibility, in that you can pretty much get them to do anything you want.

They are not exclusive to calling external services, in fact they were originally designed to provide a way to create new tags. This may have been superseded by some of the work I did in the past couple of releases which allow you to built your own tags and dynamically add them, but I still see the extension as an easy interface driven way of calling out to Python and them allowing that Python class to do what you want.

Services are my implementation of the AIML 2.0 sraix tag, which personally I think is broken. It was added by Dr Wallace to support Pandora bots and their very specific implementation of sraix and their API service. I don't even implement it 100% preferring to push config into the config file rather than the sraix definition. Having said that, Services are indeed early binding and therefore provide a way to do early init and configuration that might not be possible with an extension

For the work that I think you are doing, I think services are probably the best way, as you can push all config into config.yaml and license.keys, do early initiation and even caching/connection pooling if needed

from program-y.

Agreed. I have started moving the other interfaces to services, and using extensions to do things that seem easier to achieve in Python.

from program-y.