Raw

Where I'm staying at the moment I don't have much time to get on the computer, and net access is really lousy. But I've had a lot of chance to think about stuff that I want to do, and have realised that I can feed a few birds with one bean. The blog engine (this) I've been writing in Scala is approaching the basic level of functionality I wanted, so I'm looking again at a couple of old ideas.

The first is Semantic Web in a Box (new name needed!), the second an agent-based engine that will support scripting (I did a lightning talk about that at one of the SFSW meetups, must see if I can find the slides). Given that Scala actors are perfect for constructing the kind of agents I have in mind, as well as offering a nice way of doing the SemWeb in a Box stuff, I reckon I'll wrap it all together into one project. And the first application built with this setup can be a refactoring of my blog engine...

Many of the agents probably won't have all these features, but the stereotypical agent I want, a SemWebAgent, will have the following traits:

• named with a URI
• access from a HTTP server
• access to a HTTP client
• triplestore

+ some code that'll actually do something useful

Looking from outside, the things will look like regular Web-accessible resources, and can call/be called by external (RESTful) clients/services etc. Internally, if a particular named resource lies within the same VM then more direct messaging is possible. For scripting (when I get around to it), I've got Jython and Rhino (or equivalents) in mind. To support the pluggability of SemWeb in a Box, I'll go for OSGI, probably using Felix as the container.

I've started coding up the core actor stuff, which I will fill with unit tests as well - being new to Scala I'll no doubt make a lot of mistakes. I'm also putting together some functional tests for the blog engine, which I'll refactor to use this system. I'm already using a tiny bit of Apache Clerezza (for jax-rs handling handling of HTTP calls), I believe there'll be quite a lot more I can cherry-pick.