Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity Source Tip Author Tutorial: Difference between revisions

== Just a Function: As Simple as it Gets ==

Let's start with the standard programing trope: printing "Hello, World!". In Ubiquity, commands are simply functions with various attributes tacked on. We'll start by manually making a function to define a command, but we'll quickly move to using a more elegant method.

function cmd_hello_world() {

  displayMessage( "Hello, World!");

}

Now try Ubiq-ing "hello-world". You'll see that "Hello, World!" is immediately displayed on the screen. If you are on Mac OSX with [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growl_(software) Growl] installed the message will appear as a Growl notification. If you are on Windows, then it will appears as a standard "toaster" notification in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

There's not much in this command, so let's dive straight in. Any function that starts with <code>cmd_</code> automatically becomes a Ubiquity command. It's a little bit of namespace magic that makes development super-simple.

There are other prefixes that have other effects, like running code on page load (<code>pageLoad_</code>), and startup (<code>startup_</code>), but that's for a different tutorial.

Back to the example. The meat of the command is in the function <code>displayMessage()</code>, which displays the message in whichever way the operating system can.

You may be wondering why there is a hyphen in the name, instead of a space. That's because the Ubiquity natural language parser isn't yet smart enough to handle commands that are multiple words <i>and</i> arguments that are multiple words. It's something we'll be working on in the future.