Dented Reality Notes

After a very long wait, a downloadable version of XooMLe is now available!

This means that you can now download XooMLe and install it on your own PHP-enabled server so that you can use it locally for integrating Google search results (and cache and spelling suggestion power) into your web-based applications.

In the near future, a 'XooMLe In Action' page will also be added to the site, showcasing some of the ways that people are making use of XooMLe and Google.

I've modified the namespace being used by XooMLe because it was conflicting with some XSLs and making them not work. The top-level namespace now looks like this;

Please let me know if this causes any problems for anyone.

I've modified XooMLe slightly (Search, Spell and Cache) so that they use a local copy of the Google WSDL, rather than retrieving the remote one, because it speeds things up slightly (one less remote request).

Everything appears to be operating correctly on all operations still, so all's well. I will also be releasing a downloadable version of XooMLe soon, so that you can host it on your own server and more thoroughly integrate it with your own search solutions.

XooMLe will be a free download when it becomes available (hopefully within a week). Sign up to the mailing list on the XooMLe Project Page to be the first to know when it's available.

I've been playing around with the idea of creating a "lite" version of XooMLe, which would have less information passed back in the resulting XML, making it easier to work with for simple projects, and probably quite a bit quicker as well. The system would be based on the current one, but for the search, things would be cut down, so it might just be that I end up making a /search-lite/ method available via the normal XooMLe server.

If this happens, it will probably be a chance for me to clean up the code on the entire project, and then I might also release the code so that you can "install" your own XooMLe server :) Information will be posted here if that's the case, and I'll also post to the XooMLe-News mailing list (sign up on the XooMLe Project Page).

Anyone else hanging out for an even simpler version of the XML results? I am thinking of having something like this;

<googleSearch>
  <totalResults>xxx</totalResults>
  <time>xxx</time>
  <results>
    <result>
      <title>xxx</title>
      <URL>xxx</URL>
      <snippet>xxx</snippet>
    </result>
  </results>
</googleSearch>

Comments? Suggestions? Please use the comments link below (to the right).