breaking out request/response handling into standalone modules

[mreinstein]

To me, the biggest value that alexa-app provides is it has a small and reasonable encapsulation of parsing alexa requests, and formulating alexa compatible json responses.

I'm wondering if it makes sense to break these out into 2 small, very specific modules:

alexa-request - parses an http request body from alexa and populates a simple javascript object alexa-response - builds an http response object that can be returned to/consumed by amazon alexa

Ideally both of these modules would be absolute minimal, and just follow the alexa documentation for creating/consuming alexa requests/responses.

I haven't looked around at other alexa modules for skill presentation, but I've run into several people that don't even want to use express, let alone alexa-app for building skills, and I suspect breaking these out means people could use the same robust core alexa formatting modules across the whole ecosystem.

[mreinstein]

I just noticed that Cameron already has published modules for both of these, with the same names. They look pretty good! It might be worth standardizing on these.

@cameronhunter I noticed that neither of those npm modules have source code links, and they aren't in your personal github repo. Where's the source hosted? Can these be linked via package.json please?

[cameronhunter]

Sure thing, I'll add the repository field to package.json. They're on GitHub in a monorepo of Alexa packages: https://github.com/cameronhunter/alexa

On Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 16:50 Mike Reinstein notifications@github.com wrote:

I just noticed that Cameron already has published modules for both of these, with the same names. They look pretty good! It might be worth standardizing on these.

@cameronhunter https://github.com/cameronhunter I noticed that neither of those npm modules have source code links, and they aren't in your personal github repo. Where's the source hosted? Can these be linked via package.json please?

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/alexa-js/alexa-app/issues/228#issuecomment-294629206, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAPDBh58faHq1I8_roJHeEO7YLa4iBXMks5rw_rBgaJpZM4M_slg .

[dblock]

I'd appreciate more separation of concerns and the code that @cameronhunter linked looks good. I wouldn't mind seeing alexa-app gutted in favor of these, either by bringing that code here or taking a dependency.

Related, as always this org is happy to "host" whatever alexa projects to reduce bus factor and make things discoverable.