web service screen scraping

[Plorks mail <pl...@hotmail.com>]

dear all

has anyone written a webservice that screen scraps web sites and returns the 
html/xml to a client using the webservice?

if so what is the best way to contine, can anyone give me some examples of 
screen scraping ans using this is a n web service?

what i want it to have the web service methods take parameters and they go 
off to the various web sites and screen scrap and then i want to retrun the 
html/xml from that website.

is the the best way to return the html/xml a string?  So the client can take 
this string and transform it as a dom and do what they like to it.

Thanks for any help

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call.setUserName

[Ravi Krishnamurthy <ra...@savvion.com>]

Hello:
This may be a dump question but hope someone will answer this.

In the javadoc for org.apache.axis.client.Call java Class, there are 2 
methods setUserName and setPassword. What are these usernames and 
passwords for?

Thanks,
Ravi

Re: web service screen scraping

[Tom Oinn <tm...@ebi.ac.uk>]

Plorks mail wrote:
> 
> 
> dear all
> 
> has anyone written a webservice that screen scraps web sites and returns 
> the html/xml to a client using the webservice?

I'm not in a position to answer questions regarding it but we have a 
system called Soaplab - this is designed to allow command line tools to 
be exposed as stateful services compliant with the Life Science Analysis 
Engine specification but also includes a module called Gowlab which does 
the same for web pages by screen scraping. Details of Gowlab are here :

http://www.ebi.ac.uk/soaplab/Gowlab.html

Cheers,

Tom