Slack is a new business communication tool that is taking the world by storm. Here’s how you can use it with your Xojo apps.
As their tagline says, it’s a “messaging app for teams”. It’s also free to use (with a paid version also available) so it is easy for anyone to try.
Slack is pretty slick, making it incredibly easy to text chat with others on your team. I think it is much better than trying to use tools like iMessage, AIM or Skype for text chatting. With slack you can have multiple “channels” to keep converstations focused and attach files/images to a post. Slack has also been utterly reliable for me, unlike issues I’ve run into with iMessage and AIM.
To be fair, Slack doesn’t really offer anything all that new with regards to text chatting, but it integrates it all in a clean UI that is easily accessible by anyone.
Slack also has a web api, which of course works with Xojo. Back in September I did a webinar on a Slack library It shows you how to allow your Xojo apps to post messages to a Slack channel and to get other information about your Slack teams and channels. This library is included in with the Xojo 2015 Release 3.1 examples (Communication/Web Services/Slack).
And now this Slack library is available on GitHub to make it easier to accept community contributions.
To use the Slack library, you create an AuthToken for a Slack team account at the Slack API site (be sure to log in first).
Then you drag Slack.Connector onto your layout and call the Slack.Connector.SetAuthToken method with your token. The Open event handler is often a good place for this:
SlackConnector.SetAuthToken("AFERE34323FJDK5") ' this is not an actual token
Once authorized, you can call Connector methods to post message or get information about the Slack team and channels, with results returned to event handlers on Connector.
Refer to the ReadMe on the GitHub page for more information.
I hope you find it useful!
