Regular Web

Regular Web 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 Regular Web 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 Regular Web system that we tenderily call them witlets.

From the technical point of view, Regular Web 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, Regular Web 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. Regular Web on the other hand is 'rude' and capable of consuming any kind of information, either the server wants it or not!

Advantages of Regular Web:
• 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, Regular Web 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 Regular Web is dealing with A's dance
• Connectivity issues. Regular Web 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 collapseRegular Web is the enabling technology of the Wi-Not Mobile platform. So there is no better demo than testing the application yourself!