Re: [htdig-dev] Re: New patch - feedback

[Neal R. <ne...@ri...>]

>
> On another note, I went to a WebObjects user group meeting last night
> and learned of a very intriguing future for Mac OS X. Imagine embedding
> Safari (or just the html rendering engine) inside other applications:
> http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/
>
> I am considering putting a GUI on htdig for use as a personal search
> engine (to index and find documents on a user's workstation) rendering
> the results with the Safari rendering engine (KHTML). That way, no web
> server is needed. We'll see if that ever goes anywhere...

  This is the guts of what libhtdig & libhtdigphp is supposed to
accomplish.  Of course libhtdigphp is supposed to be used with a
webserver, but it works just fine from the command line as well..
creating a PHP file that executes the php-wrapper calls for the libhtdig APIs.

'php -e xxx.php' will execute php files from the command-line and work
great as long as the php code does not depend on environment variables set
by Apache (like REMOTE_ADDR).

  libhtdig itself could be linked into/against another C/C++ application
and be called to conduct the search & retrieve the results for display however
you want.  This is essentially the reason why the HtDig developers voted
on moving the entire codebase to LGPL.. so that anyone could use this
library for 'information retrieval' applications.

  libhtdig also contains extenstions that allow you add individual
documents to the index outside of a web-crawl.  Just fill the structure
appropriately and it will be indexed and returned on appropriate searches.

  I have not yet committed the libhtdigphp directory, due to issues about
'configure' being general enough.  I'll commit it today and see what
people think of the build process.

Thanks.

Neal Richter
Knowledgebase Developer
RightNow Technologies, Inc.
Customer Service for Every Web Site
Office: 406-522-1485