The Daunting Crusade of Developing a WhatsApp bot: Chapter I — A Taste of your own Venom
The following series of articles is dedicated to registering a recent project currently in development at ADA (Projects in Computer Engineering). The main goal of the aforementioned project is to program a WhatsApp bot to handle everyday tasks in our member-exclusive WhatsApp group.
Having little knowledge about the inner workings of WhatsApp bots and the official API, our group faced a number of initial difficulties that involved the bureaucratic obstacles imposed by Facebook’s policies: API access is only granted to relatively big companies and organizations. Thus, very soon it became blatantly apparent that we would never be able to use the official API.
Fortunately, we were able to find a workaround to this very inconvenient obstacle. That’s where Venom comes in:
As its GitHub page states, Venom is “ the most complete javascript library for Whatsapp, 100% Open Source.” That’s certainly not an understatement. Venom provides a number of different bot resources for WhatsApp: from sending messages, gifts, and stickers to retrieving new messages and getting specific information about chat groups it is incredibly extensive. It apparently works by creating an online instance of WhatsApp (much like WhatsApp Web), so you can log in using a QR Code and WhatsApp does not seem to realize you’re actually not using their interface directly. We can only speculate about whether this is a gimmick that could be revoked at any time by Facebook engineers or if it is the case that the WhatsApp team is already aware of Venom and it (quite likely) actually doesn’t care.
The Venom library would be perfect if it wasn’t for one single detail: it is written in JavaScript (more on that here). As a wise man once said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
In the next chapters, we’ll explore the mesmerizing opportunities offered by Venom, as well as give some insight into what some of our bot features are going to be.
Hope I’ll see you there.
