Hi,
I am using WWW::Mechanize/LWP and some of their subclasses now for
several things and I see an architectural problem I will be facing in
some future:
For downstream developers (and for me) I need to offer a facility
to choose a user agent which supports a number of features:
- local caching
- specialized cookie handling for specific web sites
- scripting (controlling the user agent via a dedicate language
and not via Perl method calls to WWW::Mechanize).
- triggering of application specific code at particular events
(page loaded, link selection, page unload)
- maybe optional JavaScript/DOM coverage later
Now much of this functionality is already there (I have implemented
scripting recently), but somehow spread over several packages in
incompatible ways. But for a downstream developer it is not possible
to say something like this:
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent::Pluggable;
$ua->add_plugin (new LWP::UserAgent::Plugins::Cache (size => '4M'));
$ua->add_plugin (new LWP::UserAgent::Plugins::Scriptable (plan => ...));
$ua->add_plugin (new LWP::UserAgent::Plugins::Hooks (
('http://specialsite/page' => sub { do something; }));
Does this make sense?
Sorry, if that has been discussed before.
\rho
