A software engine is a computer program that outputs source code or markup code that simultaneously becomes the input to another computer process. The analogy is that of one process driving another process, with the computer code being burned as fuel. An example of a software engine is the Wikipedia engine, as it outputs HTML simultaneously to a browser. A software engine differs from other software processes in that other software processes output data, not computer code simultaneously executed. Moreover, a software engine differs from daemons in that daemons run in the background waiting to respond to events, like web page requests.
