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Diffstat (limited to 'HACKING')
| -rw-r--r-- | HACKING | 27 |
1 files changed, 27 insertions, 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ + ageOf architecture + +ageOf determines somebody's age by querying one or more sources on the +Internet. Since there are hundreds of different sites that catalogue the ages +of famous (and not-so-famous) people, ageOf uses a plugin-based architecture. +Each source gets its own plugin, and then ageOf queries each source in turn. +The first source that gives back an age wins. + +The Haskell idiom to do a plugin-based architecture is to define a plugin data +type, and that's what I've done here. The 'RequestMethod' type represents a +plugin--a single function that takes the name of a person and returns +(depending on which constructor you use) his/her age or date of birth. To +define a new plugin, you thus need to create a new module which exports a +'RequestMethod' type. + +There are currently two plugins packaged with ageOf (though that may change in +the future). One is a sample plugin--it knows when Simon Peyton Jones (the +author of Haskell) was born, and that's it; use it as a skeleton for writing +your own plugins. The second plugin is a real, nontrivial plugin that uses +DBpedia (the Semantic Web mirror of Wikipedia) to determine the age of anybody +whose age is stored on Wikipedia. + + +Local Variables: +mode: text +fill-column: 79 +End: |