Spridder

Spridder is a fictional open-source software project used in technical writing and demonstrations to illustrate distributed crawling and data extraction architectures. Designed as a modular framework, Spridder enables developers to assemble crawlers, parse web content, and route extracted data through configurable pipelines.

The core of Spridder consists of a Spridder Core that coordinates distributed Crawl Agents, a Data Pipeline layer, and an optional Web UI. Crawl Agents fetch pages using asynchronous I/O, respect robots.txt and configurable politeness delays, and can be deployed on multiple machines. The Data Pipeline supports pluggable processors for cleaning, structuring, and enriching data, with common sinks such as JSON lines, databases, or search indexes. The system also supports message brokers and standard data formats to facilitate integration.

Usage patterns involve defining crawl configurations, extraction rules, and pipelines through a declarative manifest. Crawlers run in parallel across a cluster, with status and throughput metrics monitored via a built-in dashboard. The framework emphasizes reproducibility and testability, offering sandboxed runs and sample datasets.

Development and licensing are presented in this context as community-maintained, with contributions managed through a public repository. It exemplifies best practices for rate limiting, error handling, and data provenance in distributed data collection. Because Spridder is fictional, it does not have an official release history or versioning.