How to Create a Site-Level Search Applet???

[D. Lee Christopher]

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial for creating a site-level
search applet? I am trying to create a virtual catalog of sorts, and
I would like to be able to search the catalog and have the results
displayed on the same page with one column text and an image of the
product. I've seen several tutorials that create site-level searches
that will bring back a search results page with options to choose
from. I am looking to create a search that does not bring back this
"results" page, but displays an image of the product instead. Given
the nature of the products, search results will only bring back one
specific item, and so, I would like to skip the "results" page
altogether. Any thoughts?

I thank you in advance for your consideration.

[Grant Wagner]

Re: How to Create a Site-Level Search Applet???

"D. Lee Christopher" wrote:
[color=blue]
> Can anyone point me to a good tutorial for creating a site-level
> search applet? I am trying to create a virtual catalog of sorts, and
> I would like to be able to search the catalog and have the results
> displayed on the same page with one column text and an image of the
> product. I've seen several tutorials that create site-level searches
> that will bring back a search results page with options to choose
> from. I am looking to create a search that does not bring back this
> "results" page, but displays an image of the product instead. Given
> the nature of the products, search results will only bring back one
> specific item, and so, I would like to skip the "results" page
> altogether. Any thoughts?
>
> I thank you in advance for your consideration.[/color]

First off, Java is not JavaScript, they are two different technologies.
However, I'll comment on your idea.

It would be icky. _Very_ _icky_.

For an applet to search your site, it would have to open, download to the
browser and parse every single file on your site. The important part of
that sequence is "download to the browser". Without /some/ sort of
server-side participation, the only way for an applet to check the
contents of files that reside on the server is to open them and download
every byte contained in the files. While this is certainly possible, it
would be _slow_.

You could possibly pre-index everything and put it in an applet, then the
applet would do all the work, but if you want to do that, you'd probably
be better off using JavaScript (which is different from Java applets),
putting the index in a separate database.js file as an array and then
just update that as necessary. You're bound to have better luck with
people supporting JavaScript then a Java applet.

Truly dynamic site searches which can tell you the information based on
the site's content /right now/ have to run on the server.

--
| Grant Wagner <gwagner@agrico reunited.com>

* Client-side Javascript and Netscape 4 DOM Reference available at:
*

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* Internet Explorer DOM Reference available at:
*

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/dhtml_reference_entry.asp

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