Since 0.3.0, beagle has an AJAX based web interface. This is different from the XSP based web interface that was available in the beagle-0.1 days and subsequently removed when it was not maintained anymore. The new interface adds a minimal server to beagled and uses the XML based BeagleClient API to communicate with beagle. This adds virtually no load to beagled; the browser simply appears to be a beagleclient frontend to it. All the UI is designed using CSS and W3C compliant Javascript and HTML.
The web interface can be accessed at http://localhost:4000/. If the experimental network search service is enabled and running, then the web interface can also be accessed from other machines. The web interface can be accessed from any Gecko based browser.
It is disabled by default and can be enabled in beagle-settings or by giving the command beagle-config Networking WebInterface true.
Due to security measures in the browsers, the local file links in the returned results are not directly clickable. However, there is a particular setting in Firefox which can be used to enable opening of the links. Visit Help on the web interface page to see the procedure in detail.
Current Features
- Directly search for "foo bar" by visiting http://localhost:4000/?search=foo+bar (so, you can create search-plugins, bookmarks or link from other places).
- Groups the results into common categories like documents, images, im logs etc.
- Collapse and expand individual results. If there are lots of results in any category, then collapse all but the first 5 results.
- Shows all properties and uses nice property names (e.g. "Author" instead of "fixme:author").
- Shows snippets (on demand, to reduce load on machine).
- Shows full text for emails, right in the browser itself (on demand).
- For all the displayed properties, when hovering on them a clickable link is displayed which can be used to search for that property name and value.
- Shows beagle-status and presents option to shutdown beagle.
The TODO list can be found here.
Here's some eyecandy -- a screenshot:
Another one, showing the search results:
WebBeagle Experimental Branch
Seeing the growth of the web interface, an experimental svn branch has been created where likely-to-burn-your-comp code is kept. If you wish to risk the flames and try it out, just branch out and compile/run that code instead of beagle's trunk.
References
dBera's announcement on the dashboard-hackers ML
dBera's First Blog Post about Webbeagle
It can only be used in Gecko-based browsers right now, but almost all the JavaScript and XSL code is W3C compliant, and so fixing it for other browsers like Opera and Konqueror should not be difficult. As usual, patches are welcome :)
