I was trying to come up with a Perl project to work on and I thought of developing a system for building agents which would be able to be run by the cron and then gather and process information. I'd like to keep the framework as generic as possible so it could be used for a variety of things.

An agent will get a listing of data, check which items are already stored, and add new entries to the database as necessary. A user could then mark each item as being of interest, or delete it. Some types of agents might require a user to answer a series of questions about each item the first time they view an item. This information could be used to query and filter the data later. The agent could do some of this automatically or use a heuristic to rank each item as they come down the pipe.

Different driver programs could be used to provide different interfaces for the information stored within the database. A command line interface, and web based interface could then manipulate the same set of data.

I'm interested in hearing ideas about how to best set up the object framework for this system. I'm also interested in hearing ideas for additional features.

vroom | Tim Vroom | vroom@cs.hope.edu