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Wi-Tags
Wi-Tags is a framework which, based on the web, enables, to reach out for a an infinity of available services. The idea is based on web scraping which basically processes raw web data to extract meaningful (structured information) through the use of regular expressions.

A typical Wi-Tags system is based on two components: the web itself which abstractly is the information source, and a capable pattern matching engine. The engine is 'full' of triplets of the form (URL,pattern,output), which in fact define where to find the raw data, how to process it and finally what result to expect, and they are so fundamental to a Wi-Tags system that we tenderily call them witlets.

From the technical point of view, Wi-Tags resembles both the RESTful programming model and the Web Services programming model, but in the same time has some very striking differences. Wi-Tags is different from REST in the way the output information is processed. While REST has a bunch of formats like Json, XML, HTML and so on, Wi-Tags is armed with a regular expression set and does not assume any data format. On the other hand Web Services are built on open standards, but functionality should be provided by the server. Wi-Tags on the other hand is 'rude' and capable of consuming any kind of information, either the server wants it or not!

Advantages of Wi-Tags
  • Speed-of-light development, since functionality is placed on the 'cloud'
  • Core application functionality is platform-independent, because regular expressions are basically the same accross platforms
  • Light and powerful source code

Some of the challenges we have to face:
  • 'Website dancing'. We use this term to describe the case when web pages change their format. In case a web site changes its format, booom!, the pattern matching fails. To deal with this problem, Wi-Tags holds 'twins' of services, which means similar services e.g. from A.com and B.com. When A.com changes the format B.com is retrieved for the rescue, while Wi-Tags is dealing with A's dance
  • Connectivity issues. Wi-Tags is heavily dependent on the underlying internet connection. When this is not available special has to be taken so that a complex mobile application that relies on many witlets does not collapse

Wi-Tags is the enabling technology of the Wi-Not Mobile platform. So there is no better demo than testing the application yourself!
Last Updated ( Friday, 04 July 2008 21:37 )