Jovo4 is killing me! What is the expected lifespan of Jovo3?

#1

I built a fairly sophisticated voice adventure game on Alexa called “Adventure Castle.” Unfortunately, my interaction model broke, unexpectedly, some number of months after my final release. There were no changes on my end. I even regressed my code and model to previously stable versions with the same result. All I have to show for it now are about two and a half hours of audio voice recordings on a live Alexa device to show for it.

So, I got a good start in redesigning my skill from the ground up on Jovo3. My primary motivation was to build a skill that could be cross-platform, so I’m not married to the big corporate tech of Amazon, especially after reading Jeff Bezos’ biogrophy The Everything Store.

I still had plenty of wood to chop, but the results were encouraging. For whatever reason, I was away from it for a spell. When I returned, I found this big and exciting announcement for Jovo4. The learning curve for me has been very intimidating. I find the documentation much harder to follow and have not found any tutorials along the likes of what I was able to learn with Jovo3.

In addition to that, I’m encountering all sorts of challenges.

  1. When I CTRL+C out of of a running Jovo listener and try to launch again I frequently get:

[nodemon] app crashed - waiting for file changes before starting…

This took days of head banging before I figured out to run “killall node” before restarting. Perhaps, I’m supposed to leave the listener, open, but I’ve found cases where updates aren’t picked up without killing and restarting a session with Jovo run. I can work around this for now, but that’s frustration #1, for the record.

  1. I’m not a fan of typescript. I watched a training course on it, and it’s just not for me. I’m a single developer, and although my app isn’t tiny, I just prefer sticking with what I know. Hopefully not a problem since Jovo4 seems to still support JavaScript. I bring it up in case it’s relevant to any of my other issues.

  2. I was originally using the Jovo native model, but got an unhappy surprise when I tested from my Alexa skill to the test endpoint.

The request results in:
MatchingPlatformNotFoundError: No registered platform can handle the request.

I was unable to add the Alexa platform to my existing code (sorry, I don’t recall the exact error). I tried Jovo new to specify a project specific to Alexa and get the same error.

The fact that the MatchingPlatformNotFoundError fires when I invoke my skill tells me a packet is being received, but I’m at a loss on how to resolve it.

So, those issues aside–and as much as I want to move to the latest and greatest version-- my main question is, if I were to wave the flag and go back to Jovo3, what is the expected life expectancy for support and proper operation of that version?

Many thanks and apologies for the complaints. I held off as long as I could, but I’m to the point of facing abandoning this project I spent so much blood sweat and tears (so to speak) since around 2016. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

Bonus question: Besides the docs, is there any learning I’m missing? I saw a Udemy course covering Jovo3. Might there be anything of the sort covering Jovo4 now, or in the future?

Thanks,

James Guinn

#2

Could you tell us a little more about the interaction model bug? What error are you seeing?

We’re working on more examples. Maybe this one here is helpful: https://github.com/jovotech/jovo-sample-components

Here’s another example that works with Alexa: https://github.com/jovotech/jovo-sample-alexa-googleassistant-lambda

We’re not pulling Jovo v3 off npm, so no worries. We’re not adding new features, but we’re always considering merging community contributions to the v3 branch.

Working on more! Currently, we have this video here, which should be helpful for the initial setup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4kYbr7Mm2s

#3

Thank you, Jan, for the prompt and thorough reply.

First off, I want to say I didn’t mean for that to come off as a rant. I’m still very excited about Jovo. My frustrations are largely due to my inexperience and challenges learning/working under the constraints of being a one-man-band working as a hobby in my limited free time.

Could you tell us a little more about the interaction model bug? What error are you seeing?

The original issue pre-dates my knowledge of Jovo. I had, what I thought to be, a stable and complete Adventure game on the Alexa platform using https://github.com/alexa-js/alexa-app. The interaction didn’t give errors, but it didn’t route correctly at all. Troubleshooting that further is likely beyond the scope of this conversation, but I view that as unrelated to Jovo.

Glad to know you’re not pulling Jovo3. I did look at the first 60% of the video you shared and it provided some additional context worth pursuing. It might take a while, but I’ll also have a look at the other links you cited. Appreciate your guidance!

Many thanks for your help, so far!

Jim

#4

One more question… If I was to revisit Jovo3, where did all the docs and tutorials for that version go?

#5

Never mind. I think I found it at https://v3.jovo.tech/

However I believe I found a broken link at: https://v3.jovo.tech/docs/quickstart

Since the launch of Jovo v4 , you can access the v3 CLI with jovo3 . To do so, you need to update the v3 CLI to the latest version with npm install -g jovo-cli . Learn more here: https://www.jovo.tech/docs/migration#use-v4-and-v3-in-parallel <-- 404 Not Found