Hooker – is a distributed multiprocessing framework for execution of software agents in custom scenarios. It implements state-based object oriented programming technique written in common, interpreted language (PHP) on UNIX platform.

The name “hooker” comes from “hooks” concept – when part of an application can be altered or extended by external code automatically (“hooking”).

The main difference from other similar systems is that "hooker" - is simply a wrapper around your php code.

Your php function receives some data, processes it and outputs the result. Hooker wraps this function with sequence, scheduling, validation, load balancing, and other advanced features. But still - it is simply about executing your code.

There's a lot of existing solutions based on artificial intelligence and automation concepts. Google News, Amazon product suggestions, to name just a few.

But the problem with them – they are pre-made. Which means, they are suitable for large audience, but may be too vague and incomplete for me. For example, Google News – it has a lot of news sources, but what if I am interested in a local Tel Aviv newspaper articles too? What if I want those articles summarized for me? Google News lack this capability.

There's some very good configurable tools for web and data mining. Such as Kapow and WebQL – they are the same frameworks on top of which you can develop your custom solutions.

But – they have closed source, and this means you will not be able to create fully customized application. They implement their own configuration language, which you will have to learn.

So I tried to create a framework which is:

1. Open-source, so that it could be
2. freely customized and adjusted, from ground up, easily, so it is
3. written in a language known and understood (PHP) by wide audience of programmers; and still remain
4. powerful – it may be executed as a single process, as many processes on a single computer, or the execution may be distributed to a networked computers, including insecure networks such as internet
5. It has a full power of a PHP plus the power of a UNIX machine, so that basically anything you can do on a UNIX – you can do with hooker