Weblogs: Intelligent Agents

Things have started off rather brightly, I've got a multi multi-threaded server up and running. The services are very configurable, basically any class that extends either a ClientService, ServerService or ProxyService interface can be started as a service on any port. So I can define a config file of services to start. The server basically spins of a generic ServiceListener thread per ServerSocket, and each thread then initialises and sits there waiting for a connection. When a connection arrives the ServiceListener the then just starts a thread with the defined class to handle that connection, and it just goes back to listening.

At the moment I have a HelloWorldService that prints Hello World and disconnects, an EchoService that just echos back what is typed, and a rudimentary shell (a shell is like a Dos window, but much more powerful and flexible. Us Linux geeks just love our shells) which gives a command line access to the servers internals. The shell feels like a simplified file system, with each knowledge base being represented by a "drive", and each topic merely a directory under it. What I need to add is something to handle relationships between topics - there's no hierarchy when it comes to topic maps, so trying to enforce that is folly. It needs to be very flexible, and the relationship between topics needs to be defined at some point (just for clarity). I'm almost tempted to use a topic map to define the structure of the knowledgebase. That would save me using a "database", and I'll just have one xml file per knowledgeBase which I can load up on first access then just cache for the duration of the session.

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