Platforms

Platform integrations are responsible for communicating with platforms like Alexa, Google Assistant, the web, and more.

Introduction

A Jovo app can be connected to a lot of different platforms. For the framework to understand how to communicate with a platform like Alexa, you need to install a Jovo platform integration.

A platform integration is responsible for tasks across the RIDR Lifecycle, including:

Understand a platform's request and extract the relevant information
Provide platform-specific features only relevant for the respective platform
Translate structured output into a native response that is understood by the platform

Additionally, many platform integrations also provide CLI plugins that make it easier to build and deploy platform projects using the Jovo CLI.

Configuration

Platforms usually come with two plugin types and their configurations: App plugins and CLI plugins.

App Configuration

You can add a platform integration to the plugins array of the app configuration. The naming convention is an appended Platform after the platform's name. Here is an example for Alexa:

import { AlexaPlatform } from '@jovotech/platform-alexa';
// ...

const app = new App({
  plugins: [
    new AlexaPlatform({
      // Configuration
    }),
  ],
  // ...
});

You can find the specific configuration for each platform integration in its respective documentation, which you can find in the Jovo Marketplace.

Additionally to the platform specific config, each platform can also have its own intentMap that gets merged into the global intentMap, for example:

import { AlexaPlatform } from '@jovotech/platform-alexa';
// ...

const app = new App({
  plugins: [
    new AlexaPlatform({
      intentMap: {
        'AMAZON.StopIntent': 'END',
        'AMAZON.CancelIntent': 'END',
      },
      // ...
    }),
  ],
  // ...
});

Project Configuration

You can add a platform CLI integration to the plugins array of the project configuration. The naming convention is an appended Cli after the platform's name. Here is an example for AlexaCli:

const { AlexaCli } = require('@jovotech/platform-alexa');
// ...

const project = new ProjectConfig({
  // ...
  plugins: [
    new AlexaCli({
      // Configuration
    }),
  ],
});

You can find the specific configuration for each platform CLI integration in its respective documentation.

Platform-Specific Features

Each platform integration offers a variety of platform-specific features. You can access the platform's Jovo object by using the platform name:

this.$alexa;

If the request came from a different platform, the value of all other platform objects is undefined. This way you can distinguish between different platforms in your handlers or output classes.

if (this.$alexa) {
  // ...
}

Potentially, a platform can have various platform specific features and classes. For example, you can $alexa specific Jovo objects like this:

this.$alexa.$user;
this.$alexa.$request;
this.$alexa.$response;