asterisk users - Jun 2005 - Launching an application from within Asterisk

Hello,

I need to run an application that sets a few Asterisk
variables, that will be used by AGI scrpits.
Therefore, I believe that application should be run
somehow from within Asterisk, on startup. The
application needs to be always running, since it may
need to update those variables. Is there any simple
way to do this, like running an AGI script on startup
or do I need to compile my application as an Asterisk
application?

Thanks in avance,
Paulo