What is the Cisco Spark Community of Interest?
This is where you can start your journey as a “DevNet Sparker”.
- browse others creations, hopefully find inspiration for a bot of yours, or simply extend a code sample to bootstrap your own app.
- or learn to create bots and integrations by taking the “Cisco Spark Learning Track”.
And, once your Cisco Spark App is finalized, submit it to the Cisco Spark Depot, so that it gets global visibility and encounters the success it deserves.
What is a “Sparker”?
A developer with a passion for Cisco Spark Apps, who can think of nothing but creating integrations and bots in order to automate Enterprise Processes or Things (car, heaters, WIFI, …).
As you are reading this, it is probably you!
What are Cisco Spark Apps?
Cisco Spark Apps concretize Cisco Spark’s extensibility.
By adding Cisco Spark Integrations via the “Depot”, users can tailor their Cisco Spark experience for themselves, their teams or their entire organization. For example, the “Jira integration” will spark your teams of any issues updates (whether EPIC, Story, Task or Bugs).
By creating custom Cisco Spark Bots, developers can tie together existing enterprise processes or any existing back-end to Cisco Spark. For example, the “Room Finder” bot helps colleagues quickly find an available meeting room by polling your internal Enterprise Exchange Servers.
Are there different types of Cisco Spark Apps?
Yes, Cisco Spark Apps can be either Integrations or Bots.
What is the difference between a Bot and an Integration?
Integrations let your application request permissions to invoke the Cisco Spark APIs on behalf of Cisco Spark end-users. The process to request permission is called the OAuth Grant Flow, and is documented in the Integrations documentation.
Bots differ from integrations in that they appear in rooms with their own identity; their Cisco Spark email ends with sparkbot.io. Creating a bot is documented in the Bots documentation.
How can I learn to create my own Cisco Spark Bots and Integrations?
What are you waiting for? Take the “Cisco Spark Learning Track”.
Seriously, we’ve put together several modules to ramp you up with building and running your own bots and integrations.
What if I don’t do NodeJS, but rather code in Python, PHP, Ruby or …?
The “Cisco Spark Learning Track” and the "DevNet Creations" are great places to start from.
"DevNet Creations" showcases community projects in all languages.
Then, check the “Cisco Spark Learning Track”, several of its learning labs are language neutral.
For those that are language specific, the community is working on providing examples in more languages... and good news, you’re now part of it. Feel like contributing? Pick a code sample, translate it to your favorite language, and tweet us @CiscoDevNet.
If you’re looking still looking for more language-specificresources, check the “awesome-ciscospark” project on Github. And if you know of a valuable resource not listed on the repo, we'd love you to contribute via a pull request!
Hope you find your answers, and let's now meet in the Cisco Spark community...
