I felt like coding today, so I put together a little hack from an idea I have had for a while. What I came up with is a web search (powered by Google), that loads new search results as you scroll the page down. Try it, it’s actually pretty cool.

Here is how it works: there is a large div element at the bottom of the page just to take up space. When it comes onto the screen, an ajax request is made to the server to get the next 10 results from Google. The requests are made through Google’s SOAP api, which is no longer available, but I had an old API key so I was able to get it to work. I had all the client stuff working within an hour, but Google’s API took a while to figure out. Google uses SOAP, which is powerful but hard to code for compared to a simple GET API. It took me a couple of hours to get the server-side stuff working but it is still a hack, so don’t be surprised if you get an error or some unexpected behaviour.

It was designed for FireFox/Mozilla browsers. The only other browser I have tried it with is IE, which it does not work with. So if you are using Internet Explorer, you won’t see anything interesting.

Try it here

Unfortunately, I do not have access to a powerful Tomcat server with a lot of bandwidth, so I can’t host an online demo. If anyone has the resources and is interested in hosting it, please let me know.

Here are some screenshots of the application in action:

Since it is a web-based application, any supported web browser can be the client (see the documentation for a list of supported browsers; any modern Gecko-based browser is supported as well as IE and Opera.) The client interface is loosely based on Google Maps. The server is a Java Servlet run through Tomcat. You can read more about how it works in the documentation.

Downloads:

• webFractal 1.0 (zip file)
• webFractal 1.0 Documentation (pdf)
• webFractal 1.0 Documentation (text)