3: External Application

Invoking screen-scraper Externally

If you've decided to use the basic edition of screen-scraper your only option for invoking screen-scraper externally is to use the command line (invoking screen-scraper from the command line is also available in the Professional and Enterprise Editions). If you are using a Professional or Enterprise edition of screen-scraper and have access to a server that supports ASP, PHP, ColdFusion, or Java you can continue the tutorial by selecting which language you desire to use at the bottom of the page.

The rest of this page is particular to completing the tutorial using a server language. If you are using a Basic Edition of screen-scraper you are welcome to read on but you will not be able to complete the tasks.

Oftentimes you'll want to use a language or platform external to screen-scraper to scrape data. screen-scraper can be controlled externally using Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, ColdFusion, any COM-friendly language (such as Active Server Pages or Visual Basic), or any language that supports SOAP. In this next part of the tutorial we'll give examples in PHP, Java, ColdFusion, and Active Server Pages.

Running the screen-scraper Server

In order to interact with screen-scraper externally it needs to be running as a server. When running as a server screen-scraper acts much like a database server does. That is, it listens for requests from external sources, services those requests, and sends back responses. For example, when you issue a SQL statement to a database from an ASP script your script opens up a socket to the database, sends the request over it, then receives the database's response back over the socket. Once this transaction has been completed the socket will be closed, but the database will continue to listen for other requests. screen-scraper works in a similar way.

At this point we'd recommend reading over the documentation page that discusses running screen-scraper as a server, and gives details on how to start and stop it according to the platform you're running on. Follow the link below, then return back to this page when you're finished:

• Running screen-scraper in server mode

Before we start writing code to interact with screen-scraper externally we need to configure a few things. Depending on the language you'd like to program in, please follow one of the links below, which will give you an overview of interacting with screen-scraper using that language and guide you through any configuration that needs to take place. Once you're finished return back to this page.