Hey Ben,<br>Imagine opening your browser, installing WebDeveloper Plugin, visiting a page, and clicking "View Generated Source" and saving it to a text file.<br>This is what I am doing server-side with no browser or client involved, completely from the execution of a program.<br>
<br>Let me be more specific, I'm not talking about server-side ECMA script execution, I'm talking about Emulating a Browser Engine - Server side programatically.<br>It is pretty difficult to simulate the exact manner in which your browser renders, displays, arranges, re-orders, event listens, parses the DOM when received from a server not to mention how your browser handles redirects, forwards, headers, meta tags - on and on.<br>
<br>It would (In my opinion) be a bad idea for me to attempt to replicate the behavior of a Browser in any fashion by attempting to execute Javascript / ECMA script server side. If you could for example get a Javascript (jquery) library to act upon a DOM server-side or you know of a way I would be very interested to know about it.<br>
<br>In addition when you interact and execute Javascript using a Browser engine (Gecko, or Webkit) you have programmatic access to the execution, callbacks/events, the dom itself, and lots of other stuff that you normally wouldn't by just running server-side Javascript.<br>
<br>The more interesting part of this was to actually render screenshots of webpages as a browser does in a Virtual Framebuffer.<br><br>Believe it or not, I'm using this code now for debugging purposes in my web-development and the possabilities are endless :)<br>
<br>I hope this better explains what I am doing...<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Ben Rousch <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:brousch@gmail.com">brousch@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div></div><div class="h5">On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Ben DeMott <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ben.demott@gmail.com" target="_blank">ben.demott@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><div></div><div class="h5">
For those that might be interested ...<br><br>Recently for work I told a customer that wanted headerless execution (server side) of Javascript that I "Couldn't do it".<br>Now over the last few years I've looked into the subject a few times, always being quite pessimistic about it.<br>
<br>Over the last year I've been doing iPhone development and using the WebKit API - Using the Cocoa api you can "headerlessly" execute a web page by just not drawing the display buffer to the screen.<br>Awhile after this customer asked for completely programmtic headerless rendering I had some free time so I looked back into the issue. Knowing that the WebKit api can be accessed in such a way for this to be "theoretically" possible I pushed on...<br>
<br>And that is when I came across Nokia's API - the Qt ('cute') API has WebKit support amongst many other things, and actually after working with the iPhone SDK I feel pretty at home using it.<br>It's an event driven api, written in C++ ...<br>
<br>After researching the Qt library a bit, I found that it had Python bindings (even better) and it's most recent version supported a very modern version of WebKit similar to what Safari uses.<br><br>I then started looking for a way of actually 'drawing' the webpage, I knew that if I could draw to a Frame Buffer I could probably programatically on a server save and render images of web pages.<br>
<br>After quite a lot of work I came across the work of several other individuals that had used the same process involving Qt - Although the code was a bit poorly implemented.<br><br>I took concepts from several of the resources I found and wrote a python application that uses Xvfb (the X Virtual Frame Buffer) to render a web page, on a server.<br>
All you need is Python, pyQt4, Xvfb, (a script called Xvfb-run that supposedly comes with Xvfb, but I had to install manually) and a Linux distro in a 2.6 kernel variant.<br>I have it working very well on a Fedora 9 distro with the apps listed above, if anyone is interested in my code example, or further instructions let me know and I'll throw it up on a website.<br>
<br>And all of this was sadly to crawl google results (google re-orders and dynamically controls results with Javascript client side, including business results) <br>If anyone wants the PHP functions that parse google (using DOM) let me know ...<br>
Along with this (sadly - I'm not proud of this) I wrote a Google Image results parser...<br><br>Customers are mad, because the code will obviously break when google makes any changes but it was quite the experiment in code :) ... and I got paid for it.<br>
<br>The image code was to (help) find logo's for companies / organizations.<br>Garmin's data provider (InfoUSA) tracks 13,000 franchises/organizations the system had about an 80% success rate on those organizations - check out an example here.<br>
<br>(type in a company name, like 'mcdonalds')<br><a href="http://apginc.net:8380/binja/test_image_query.php" target="_blank">http://apginc.net:8380/binja/test_image_query.php</a><br>
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<a href="http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug" target="_blank">http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug</a></blockquote><div><br>I may be a bit dense here, but I'm not sure about what you mean by "headerless". There are several ways to execute javascript server-side: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript</a><br>
<br>Or are you "viewing" web sites by saving them to an image or something?<br></div></div><br>
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