Hi Stef,
In very simple terms I want to build a system that would look at what
you are typing in a text box, and have various agents that analyse the
text and modify/augment it.
Simple Examples:
1. If I enter a web address it could look it up on Delicious.com and
extract links that had been similarly tagged.
2. If I enter something that looks like a name, it would search
google scholar, or mendeley and include links to any documents
3. If I entered "call david tomorrow" it would be able to add
something to my things to do list.
My - very early - thoughts are that I need to continually parse the
text, as I type, and various agents would look for the things they are
interested in. The question is how best to model this, and process
the data.
You see this is what the color higlighting is doing.
You type and in parallel it is trying to colorize the text.
After I'm not sure that you need agents running all the time (reacting
to each characters you type).
I would be you I would
- prototype a hierarchy of classes whose instances have a kind of
patterns to know if they should be kick in
- at the end of each line, I would send the line to a list of such
"agent" and react
- then only then, I would consider to fork the behavior of the agents.
why? because when you can avoid concurrency this is simpler :)
Cheers
Andy