When we loaded about 6 GB of songs on the nano, we did a search which was amazing, brought up the songs and albums (distinguished nicely by an icon) and we were happy. Until, we wanted to do another search. Unfortunately the search that we did earlier brought about 200 results and we scrolled down to pick up a song of our choice and played it. When we wanted to do another search, I couldnt find out a way to get to the interface where I could type for returning Search results. Ah! I never thought Apple’s products need more learning that what is required but Ive been fooled before by iTunes (which IMO is a piece of crap). 

As a proper end-user, I looked up the skinny 2 page manual hoping that there will be some mention of the Search functionality. None..nilch..nada…ZERO no mention there. I started scrolling through the search results back and forth desperately and ha, found the option for re-entering another Search. Its the first option in the Search Results. Apparently, Someone at Apple thought they could save another menu option by adding the “search” along with “search results”. Cmon guys, Im not a UEx Designer, but I dont think it needs a lot more thinking to find out that you need to have an intuitive way of telling people how to get back to a search menu.

The good thing about mapstraction is that in addition to abstracting the interfaces, it also provides some gaps that are not implemented by specific providers.

The source is also available here

I was wondering if it would be possible to use the “search engine” helpers that are available in Firefox 2 and IE 7. That would just make us enter the artifact id in the “Search engine” box and it takes us directly to that page (ofcourse after you login once to the application). Luckily the OpenSearch Specification helps us here. Just Create an xml that adheres to the Opensearch specification and loading that page in both Firefox(2 and above) and IE(Version 7 and above) adds those to the list of search engines managed by your browser. There is a good tutorial at mozilla developer center. Ill cover the basics here. If you are interested, I can even make an application that lets you fill in the details and will post the xml file that you can use for adding your own search engine. Please add a comment if you are interested.

Without further ado, here is the minimal template for the xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
      <ShortName>Some Short Name that appears in the Search Engines box</ShortName>
      <Description>Long Description</Description>
      <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="URL that needs to do the job"></Url>
  </OpenSearchDescription>

Call this file, say, plugin.xml in your web root directory. For a simple Apache server install, place this in /var/www (or whatever your DocumentRoot is).

An example of the template modified for Google Search Engine is shown below

<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
      <ShortName>My Google</ShortName>
      <Description>Google search implemented as firefox addon</Description>
      <Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q={searchTerms}"></Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>

Save that as google-plugin.xml. The thing to note above is the {searchTerms} in the URL Tag above. This will be replaced with whatever is entered in the searchbox. So if you entered “test”, the url will be http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=test and will take you to that page.Using this as a template, you could modify any REST-ful GET URLs that will retrieve your page. Heck, it would be nice if all webapps have this behaviour as we are all used to entering things in the Search URLs rather than a few clicks.

Deploying this in Browsers:

• Create a HTML File with this tag in the HEAD section of the file

        <link rel="search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" title="Some identifiable text" href="/plugin.xml" />

• In the above example, replace the title with what you want to see in the Search Engine box and href with path to your Opensearch XML File. In my case, its in the DocumentRoot, so the /plugin.xml.
• Load the html file in your system.
• Once the page is loaded, you should see a “Add <title>” in the Search engines list.
• Click on the Button and you should have that plugin added right into your browser.
• Make that your default section by going to “Manage Search Engines” or just select it to enter text in there which will take you to google
• If you need to delete this,go to “Manage search engine” and Remove it

• Load the plugin.html directly in your browser
• In the Search List, click on the button that says “Add Search Providers” and click on the one that you just added
• Once its done, the plugin should be added in your search list
• Make that your default or select it to enter search terms
• As in Firefox, to delete it, go to “Manage engines” and delete it

The parsing of the code is done using the Antlr parser (more on this in a later series). But if you just need to see how the internal operations of Groovy work, do the following.

1. Download the Groovy source here (Link points to 1.5.4 version)
2. Unzip the contents into a directory. Point Intellij or Eclipse to it
3. Get the JAD Decompiler here
4. Unpack JAD into a directory and add it to your PATH environment variable
5. Write a small script similar to this (the script demonstrates the usage of the “plus” operator on integers). Groovy autoboxes the integer to java.lang.Integer but youd see that in action soon on your IDE.
   
def a = 1, b = 2
assert a.class == Integer.class
assert b.class == Integer.class
println a.plus(b)

6. Compile this using the groovyc compiler to generate a test.class file (Assuming that your script was called test.groovy)
   
groovyc test.groovy

   You should see a test.class in this directory after you run the above command
7. Test Run this first to see if it actually works. You need to add the groovy-.jar and asm-2.2.jar to your class path for this to work
   
java -cp /apps/groovy-1.5.1/lib/groovy-1.5.1.jar:/apps/groovy-1.5.1/lib/asm-2.2.jar:. test

   The output of this should be (unsurprisingly) 3
8. Decompile this code just to see whats going on using jad
   
jad test.class

   You should see a pretty sweet t.jad in the same directory. If you need a .java suffix, use
   
jad -s java test.class

9. Now try running this with an IDE. Set up a breakpoint like this when you run your Groovy code
   
java -Xdebug -Xnoagent -Djava.compiler=NONE -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=5005 -cp /apps/groovy-1.5.1/lib/groovy-1.5.1.jar:/apps/groovy-1.5.1/lib/asm-2.2.jar:. test

   Remember to set “suspend=y” on the above line, otherwise the code will run through even before you connect your debugger.
10. Connect your IDE to this port. For Intellij, click on “Edit Configurations”, add a new Remote debugging instance and set to port to 5005 (If its not set already)
11. Put a breakpoint in ScriptBytecodeAdapter class’s invokeMethodN method and start the fun. Its going to be a pretty long debug session (Yes, for the “1+2″ operation) , but should be fun.

Happy Reverse Engineering!

Well, Thanks for stopping by and I hope to provide some content that might be interesting to the readers. I might also post some weird photos that I find.