Re: [MacPerl] MacOS 8.5 Sherlock modules (partly-baked idea)

[Brian "L." Matthews <blm@halcyon.com>]

Charles Albrecht writes:
|>However, as Sherlock is really just a clever web browser, it should be
|>possible to replace the Sherlock application with a MacPerl script. To
|What I've been thinking for a while, and what I think Rich may be 
|hinting at, is a utility - written in MacPerl (naturally) - which would 
|automate, or at least streamline, the process of authoring Sherlock 
|modules.  

Perhaps, although they're pretty easy to write, and determining the
format of the search engine's output would be tricky.

Chris Nandor writes:
|No, it is not a bad idea, except that Sherlock checks multiple sites
|simultaneously, and MacPerl (for now) could only do one at a time.  And it
|would be difficult (for me, anyway) to do a UI as nice as Sherlock's.  But
|in theory, yes, this could be done (much better once MacPerl has threads).

I hadn't thought of the simultaneous request bit. Does that have to be
done with threads? A script should be able to send off multiple requests
wait for the replies, then process them one at a time.

|As to creating Sherlock plugins, I thought about a module to do it, and it
|would not be hard.  Probably easier to write than to read.  But it really
|is not too hard to make them by hand.  Anyone who can do HTML forms can do
|a Sherlock plugin.

Yes, they seem pretty simple. The hard part would be figuring out how to
break apart the reply, and I think it would be hard to write a script
smart enough to be useful.

Rich Morin writes:
|Not directly, it appears, but I could imagine writing a CGI script that
|was optimized to work with the Sherlock browser.  Note that the script
|need not have anything to do with Internet resources...

Yes! Write a Sherlock module that uses a CGI written in perl that does all
the real work, then packages the results for Sherlock. You could then use
Sherlock on anything that you can write a perl script to access, which is
most everything. :-) It would even be useful for HTML sites because you'd
have the full power of perl for parsing results. And you don't have to do
any UI work as you're using Sherlock for that. I think this is the way to
use perl with Sherlock.

Brian

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