Introducing SelectorGadget – Dapper Style DOM Selection for JQuery, Javascript, and beyond

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I caught a jquery tweet today that linked me to an interesting little helper bookmarklet called “SelectorGadget”.

“SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze.”

SelectorGadget, is a very easy to use bookmarklet that can be used on any website of your choosing (Although someone in the comments DID have a problem with scraping a site that is NTFW )

To get started with SelectorGadget, head over to their humble website, and install the bookmarklet and watch the video. Anyone with experience in Data Extraction (Hpricot or Beautiful Soup – as the website suggests), will immedately see the benefits of this little application.

With apparent support from JQuery, and its open-source repository over at github, I think SelectorGadget will be able to spawn alot of interest within the various Javascript and DOM Selection/Extraction camp’s around the internet.

Some ideas for you guys to dig your teeth into after the fold.

My Forseeable Uses for SelectorGadget and its Algorythms:

1. Speed up creation of GreaseMonkey userscripts(.org) for those of us who rely on JQuery for our javascript prowess.
2. Make DOM Selection in your own Javascript Applications (jquery included), MUCH MUCH easier
3. Dynamic JQuery plugins for data extraction – Make more versitile plugins to manage dynamic datasets.
   • For Example:
     • Creation a plugin that adds dom to specific element types of a page (mp3 player to mp3 links)
     • Generalize the selection of the mp3 links
     • Drop in mp3 player plugin to any page w/out any need to initilize
4. Creation of your own Dapper Engine????????
   • For instance if you could (hypothetically) get jaxer running this javascript selection engine. Then maybe… you could be running a serverside DOM Selector engine with native ajax-scraping abilities…Hrrmm…
5. Quick Ruby Data Extraction & Screen Scraping
   • Hpricot, or better yet scrubyt, OR even better still skimr (the re-factored scrubyt for those of you who have been paying attention)
6. SelectorGadget to phpQuery ? – phpQuery is a dom selector engine for php designed to be a port of JQuery to php. Its pretty good but a little slow for my liking.

The Death of PHP in Data Extraction

Yes, I am calling it. This is not breaking news as Ruby’s scrubyt (and its driving forces WWW:Mechanize and Hpricot), have been dominating the “custom api creation” process for awhile now. Still, php is so common and easy to get up and running its hard for me drop it all together.

Software like SelectorGadget gives me even more reason to move away from php and work on my Ruby development more. As an interim solution (in the interest of time) I imagine myself using Ruby for my data and php for my presentation.

OR, if I can finally get a solid native jaxer server running I could simply use my javascript skills to properly deploy my data extraction javascript applications. (If your a jaxer master, please message me, I’ve tried numerous times with limited success)

Until I am a ruby master (which might take time as I’m learning far too many languages atm), I am going to see what I can hack out of the SelectorGadget engine. Its algorithms might unlock a very cool selector engine for php (aka an improved or refactored phpQuery )

Anyway, I think SelectorGadget has ALOT of promise and I see this accomplishment echoing through a lot of different technologies and software. I know I am going to dig into it and see what I can do. I’ll be sure to report all of my findings to you good people.

Happy api’ing.

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