get other site's elements - javascript

Is there a way to use a not local site as a source for my own? For example get a price from an e-shop everytime my site refreshes.
Is it possible to use something similar to this but somehow from a custom source?
document.getElementsByClassName('price')[0]

Not directly inside a browser, at least not without great effort. Browsers take great pains to try to isolate sites from each other to prevent attacks called CSRF.
If you are running a system like nodejs or php to build your system, you can run a cron process to go fetch the price you need and embed it into your source.
I usually use python when I want to scrape a site, but most common programming languages will have libraries to import data from a url.

Related

Any way to create an application with the local web page as an interface?

A few days ago I decided to make my own "interface" to make it easier to organize (and work with) some of my personal files. You know when a lot of related data, pictures and links are right in front of you and you can change them in a couple of clicks, this is very convenient.
I started by studying HTML, CSS and JS, because I thought that the changes made to the local page would be saved somewhere on my PC so I can just run Index.html and do whatever I want. But they didn't. Refreshing the page erased all changes.
Using browser localstorage does not suit me, because if I change the browser, the data will be lost. I wanted it to just open with Index.html and work fine even if I change my browser or move the site folder to another computer.
Then I decided to learn more about server-side languages (such as PHP or Node.js) because they are directly related to databases, so I was hoping to save changes through them. But these languages required me to really open the server, with ip and port tracking. And I just wanted to open a local page through one file, without any ports or connections via the console. So this method scared me off quickly.
So is there an easy way to make a local page like this? Maybe I have not studied well one of the above methods and it has this opportunity?
Or the best I can hope for is a simple application that will use that local page as an interface to interact with data? I accidentally heard about this possibility a long time ago. Then I will ask you to give at least a hint as to which language to choose for this.
I don't understand well everything that lies outside of vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, so a complete study of a complex language like Java or Python will be too difficult for me, and the goal is not worth such a lot of effort.
I hope I understand correcly what you are trying to do.
If your goal is to make an application to manage your files, I think the simplest solution will be, as you said, to look into NodeJS and the File system api which will let you interact with your files through javascript code.
Your program will have to be in two part that will have to interact:
the "front" html page
the "back" nodejs script
The downside is that you'll have to go deeper into your study of the language to learn how to create the interactions you want between your html file and your NodeJS application.
However, there is no need to open your server to the web to make it work. The NodeJS application can be set to listen to requests from only the computer that runs it (localhost).
I obviously can't get too much into details without knowing precisely what you want to do but you'll probably have to learn to make a local server with node (search "nodejs http" or "nodejs express"), then make requests to it via the html page's scripts (search "ajax request").
What you need to look into are (web based) content management systems. like strapi or "grand old dame" WordPress.

Is there any way to automatically synchronize html5 localstorage between computers

I have a simple offline html5/javascript single-html-file web application that I store in my dropbox. It's a sort of time tracking tool I wrote, and it saves the application data to local storage. Since its for my own use, I like the convenience of an offline app.
But I have several computers, and I've been trying to come up with any sort of hacky way to synchronize this app's data (which is currently using local storage) between my various machines.
It seems that chrome allows synchronization of data, but only for chrome extensions. I also thought I could perhaps have the web page automatically save/load its data from a file in a dropbox folder, but there doesn't appear to be a way to automatically sync with a specific file without user prompting.
I suppose the "obvious" solution is to put the page on a server and store the data in a database. But suppose I don't want a solution which requires me to maintain apps on a server - is there another way, however hacky, to cobble together synchronization?
I even looked for a while to see if there was a vendor offering a web database service - where I could, say, post/get a blob of json on demand, and then somehow have my offline app sync with this service, but the same-origin policy seems to invalidate that plan (and besides I couldn't find such a service).
Is there a tricky/sneaky solution to this problem using chrome, or google drive, or dropbox, or some other tool I'm not aware of? Or am I stuck setting up my own server?
I have been working on a Project that basically gives you versioned localStorage with support for conflict resolution if the same resource ends up being edited by two different clients. At this point there are no drivers for server or client (they are async in-memory at the moment for testing purposes) but there is a lot of code and abstraction to make writing your own drivers really easy... I was even thinking of doing a dropbox/google docs driver myself, except I want DynamoDB/MongoDB and Lawnchair done first.
The code is not dependent on jQuery or any other libraries and there's a pretty full features (though ugly) demo for it as are well.
Anyway the URL is https://github.com/forbesmyester/SyncIt
Apparently, I have exactly the same issue and invetigated it thoroghly. The best choice would be remoteStorage, if you could manage to make it work. It allows to use 3rd party server for data storage or run your own instance.

WebSite Javascript Search Engine

I'm looking for any javascript library that i can use to search content on my website, i have came across quiet a few but mostly they require the use of a database to store indexes for optimizing search queries, but i only need a database free search engine built in with javascript. can anyone direct me to the right location(url) where i can download it and install it on my website, which is build on a cakephp framework. Was thinking of a search engine that could index every new page a include in my website maybe once a night and then when i search it should output the search results on the separate page and with links to the actual pages where the keyword was taken from.
Happy new year and have a splendid year ahead..
I bet your mistaken about JavaScript. In order to search, you will be needing records coming from the users which will be stored in the database so basically, you will be dealing with server side languages not JavaScript. JavaScript is only used for client-side which doesn't have to do anything with the database (Not unless your using Node.js).
Both JavaScript and the browsers have come a long way. You could use Lunr or search-index. Both can run in the browser. For search-index you use localStorage as the index. That means your data is stored per domain, in the browser. Nothing to install, nothing to maintain. And low server requirement since it's all happening on the client side.
Lunr is more mature and quicker to get up to speed, but search-index is maybe more feature rich?

Google Gadget, Javascript (Or Other) Way To Port Collected Data

I am working on a Google Gadget that will collect some data through Google API's. What I am getting stuck on is how to collect the data and then save it somewhere to be processed later. The final idea being that I would run the gadget on my own computer it would collect the data and then save it to somewhere on my own computer. (I guess I want to emphasize that this is, for now, a small personal project and does not necessarily need fancy server scripts, I want to be able to run this all on my PC running XP).
Is there a pure Javascript way to save a file on a computer?
Can I use other languages besides XML, HTML, and Javascript to add functionality to my Google Gadget?
Edit: The goal of this is to be able to log how many of my contacts are signed into gchat over a period of time. I decided on a Gadget because that was the only way I could figure out how to access that information. Any other ways to approach this idea are welcome!
No, Javascript alone cannot save a file automatically. And be careful, javascript is affected by the no cross domain rule. If you're hosting the project on your own computer, why bother writing a complex Google Gadget?
I suggest a simple PHP script, and MySQL, if you like, to store the data. By itself, PHP should be more than enough to run most tasks. If you would like me to add in more info about this, please tell me what type of task.
In increasing order of flexibility:
The options object is almost certainly the easiest approach - not really designed for that kind of usage but I suspect it would be fine for your use case.
On windows you could use system.filesystem to get hold of the WScript FileSystemObject which you can then use to create files and write to them.
Also see the Google desktop API blog for embedding an SQLite database in your gadget (looks pretty easy).

What is the best practice to decouple GUI design from server-side development when developing modern web applications?

We are currently developing a few web applications and are letting our designers convert signed off paper prototypes into static web pages. In addition to having hyperlinks between pages the designers have started adding jquery calls to update elements on the pages by fetching data from static json files. Once the designers are finished and handoff the completed web pages, CSS, and JavaScript files; the server-side developers then edit the pages and replace the references to the local static json documents with references to live json urls that return the same json data structures.
My question:
What are efficient ways to decouple GUI design from serverside dev and reduce the integration time and effort? Some examples:
Do you have the developers manually change every json reference in the designers' prototype web pages?
Do you add a global variable somewhere to enable the designers' pages to be easily switched back and forth between using static and dynamic data?
Do you make the web pages self-aware of when they are running from a web server or just being served from a folder somewhere?
It depends on how much state information does your application need to manage. The examples you have given mention only read operations from the server. Are there any writes? Both read and write operations can potentially fail. Do your designers take care of those cases, or the server-side team jumps in and patches up the GUI later on?
I think it's best to provide a mock server-side implementation of your services for the designers. The server mock could simulate real life behavior as in throw errors and exceptions beyond just the happy path. It really is much less of a hassle to install a simple web server nowadays and a single script that acts as a mock service, rather than trying to create processes for later integration.
One of the things I have seen work fairly successfully for the whole "url/path" problem (dev vs test vs production, etc) is to create a subdomain for your project of "proto" (so proto.mycoolapp.company.int) and have that be the basis for all urls used anywhere in the app.
On top of that using whatever framework you are using set up global page handlers to identify section/page/function+[url data] for all of your data files (i.e. json calls etc).
This allows you to segregate your app into sections and build up functionality as you go and allows both the UI team and the dev team to work on hints for the other team.
For example say I have an app with three sections (login, account management, preview) I would have a login url service (data, files, whatever) at proto.mycoolapp.company.int/frontend/login/securelogin?user=GrayWizardX. The UI team can add these as they identify a need for data and your app dev team can see what functions are being requested (through server logs, etc) and make sure everything is matching up.
The good part is that when you move to production, the only change is to find "proto" and replace it. If that is in your global var, then its a quick and simple change.
It's not real clear what exactly your environment is (plain html only? or something like php?), so this is a bit of a shot in the dark...
If it's plain old HTML + javascript, you could probably use a javascript include on each page to get the right set of addresses. When the include file with all this environment specific information (i.e. use local or use server) remains in the same relative place, you don't need to worry about modifying the actual page. Just tell the GUI guys to always use this same set of variables for the address information and define the address information in that include file. The variable names don't change whether your getting locally or from the server, just the values stored in the variables.
I'm low on Vitamin Coffee, so hopefully that makes sense.

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