CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidioscordovascreen-scraping
marlar
marlar

Reputation: 4145

Phonegap combined with native code for screen scraping app

I am going to develop a cross-platform app that will need some screen scraping capabilities. The app itself looks like an obvious candidate for Phonegap since the UI is quite static and simple (no fast UI interaction needed) - it is basically a kind of foreign currency comparator which needs to show some updated exchange rates and a few simple graphs.

The problem is however that it needs to connect to certain sites and grab the data from there using screen scraping. There is no API. I have many years experience with screen scraping in PHP, and some experience in native Android using jsoup. And the "app" already runs in PHP (on server) for use in browsers, but the client needs a real app.

What are my choices for screen scraping in Phonegap? I reckon that the javascript support available is not suited for screen scraping, but is it possible without too much fuss to build a native layer beneath the Phonegap app?

I have virtually no experience with Phonegap, so I might have missed some obvious solutions. If so, please advice me.

As a side question, does an equivalent of jsoup exist for IOS (objective C)?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1221

Answers (1)

Yevgeniy
Yevgeniy

Reputation: 1333

Bobik is the very API you are looking for. It lets you tap into its cloud computing power through the API in which you only provide the urls and xpath/jquery queries. Read my article at http://zscraper.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/client-side-web-scraping/ to see Bobik in action.

Upvotes: 1

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