Architecture of Scone
Scone has a modular architecture with four base and several support components. These components
can be easily enhanced and combined to develop new Web tools.
Have a look at the Scone documentation to learn more on how to use and program Scone.
Base components
- Programmable Proxy: Interfaces for the access and manipulation of documents.
The proxy is based on IBM’s WBI (Web Based Intermediary), which meanwhile has
adopted the object- and tokenstream concept
we introduced for Scone in a scientific exchange cooperation. This simplifies and speeds up the processing of data.
WBI offers a performant proxy platform with many debugging features, which can be freely used
in research environments.
- NetObjects: Represent and store Web based data like URIs, HTML-documents, links, servers,
users and their activities. The creation and the access to these objects can be used to send events to observer classes.
The high-speed object-to-RDB mapping utilizes a cache concept. A POET OSS version does also exist.
- Robot: Scone’s personal robot crawls the Web bound to customized rules while filling the database.
The Robot can be used to index whole Web sites, but it was
designed for the use as user agent, to gather specific information on client side.
Scone Robots uses a classifier-filter-concept,
which allows the classification of links of documents depending on
their attributes and the filtering of these objects according to these classification.
- Access Tracking: Scone is able to trace the actions of a user when using a Web browser. Different kinds
of access events can be generated, depending on whether he clicked a link, filled a form or pushed the back-button.
Support Components
- RAS: The Remote Access Server simplifies the communication between Scone and Applets and non-Java applications.
- Document Parser: Scone's standard document parser analyzes documents and generates meta data of the content and the topology.
- Thumbnail-Generator: The thumbnail generator can be used to create small images of web-pages.
- BrowserControl: Scone allows plugins to easily send messages to the browser like opening or closing a window, resizing a window or loading a specific URI.
- Evaluation: Scone offers a component which can be used to easily generate GUIs with instructions and questions to
allow controled usability experiments.
- Scone plugin registration and configuration GUI: Scone and its plugins can be easily configured and changed by a convenient graphical user interface.
- Scone Logreader: The logreader can be easily configured and used to read different Server log files into the Scone database.
- Several helper programmes written in C to control the Internet Explorer.
Scone Plugins
New Web enhancements are implemented in Scone as plugins. These plugins have access to
all features and components of Scone. Furthermore Scone can be easily modified for its
modular architecture.
Plugins can easily manipulate the pre-parsed HTML streams flowing through the proxy,
gather and process data from the internet and serve this information as static or dynamic documents to the browser.
Plugins have full read/write access to the objects in the database.
Some example plugins are included in the scone package, and can be downloaded.
For more Information please contact Harald Weinreich
Last Update: 02-Feb-2009
Scone has a modular architecture with four base and several support components. These components
can be easily enhanced and combined to develop new Web tools.
Have a look at the Scone documentation to learn more on how to use and program Scone.
