[alicebot-developer] Deploying Program D and an information retrieval application on a web server

[Joe Tallett]

Hi guys,

IÂ’m in need of your help.

IÂ’m currently doing a project involving a slightly adapted version of 
program d running in conjunction with a second java application which is 
used to retrieve information from the internet and relay that info to the 
bot. What I want is to deploy the combined system on a web server so that 
people can go and chat to the bot and I also need to be able to access the 
conversation logs so that I can do some analysis on them.

What I want to know is what is the best way to go about this? I have already 
tried using pandorabots to host the bot, but it appears that I canÂ’t alter 
some of the configuration files (in particular the predicates.xml that is in 
the conf folder in program d binary) that I am going to need to change.

So I assume I will need my own webserver (or host server) to get the system 
running. What I would like to know is would it be easiest to just upload the 
already compiled web version of program d (downloaded from aitools.org and 
including a WAR file and a couple of other folders) straight onto a server? 
If I went about it this way I would also upload my own information-retrieval 
application as a second war file on the server (is this possible?) and have 
the two running side-by-side on the server. I would use the <system> tag of 
AIML (or <javascript>?) to transfer information between the two when needed. 
Is this feasible/efficient as a way of deploying the system? Or would it be 
easier to integrate the source code of program D and my Java app into one 
and then upload just the one WAR file?

Also would I need to use a database to store conversation logs? I assumed so 
but found that my binary non-web version of program D seems to save logs 
anyway in the var/programd folderÂ…

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Joe

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