Demonstrations
The following examples describe the types of programs that can be written using Thunderstone's Texis Web Script (Vortex). To demo any of these examples, click here.
- Open Directory Search Engine
This engine searches the Open Directory
Project's growing catalog of over 4 million web sites. The raw data is
offered by Open Directory as RDF/XML
data files. Our search engine downloads this data, converts it
into a Texis database, and provides a categorized, searchable
interface.
- Site Search
A web crawler written entirely in Vortex, using its ability to
fetch and distill pages from web servers,
is dispatched to a user specified
web site. All of the HTML, text, and PDF files are retrieved and their
textual content stored in a database. The user may then perform
searches against this dataset. When viewing answers the user may view
additional information about the matching document(s), or jump to the
original document on the crawled web site.
- Message Boards
Among the features that make this more than a simple message service are
group types, including public, moderated, and private; message flags,
such as public or private; an integrated spell-checker;
and the ability to be notified when new messages are added.
- Stock Quotes
Stock quotes are fed to a dedicated local computer provided by a
leading stock information provider. A web interface to the data on this
machine allows Vortex to fetch realtime information about stocks
requested by the user. The stock machine also provides daily static
data updates that are fed into a Texis database to be used in
conjunction with the realtime data when the user asks for information
about a stock. The user interface also allows users to create folios of
their favorite stocks so that they may see them all at a glance.
- Auction & Classifieds
Many of the features that make Texis unique are demonstrated here. Beyond
the simple ability to search through the text of the listings, one can
also restrict by price, and sort on a number of different fields. This
application also shows the ability of Texis to find listings immediately
after insertion.
- Custom News
A differential web crawler is used to look at front pages of various news
sources. New stories are found and indexed. At the same time they are
compared against the profiles that users have stored using the profiling
features of Texis. The users story list is then updated.
Code Examples
These code examples show Texis Web Script's diversity and ease-of-use.
The databases contain about 20 gigabytes of data.
Copyright © 1996 Thunderstone Software
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