I've published the first version of the application that I called 'Deja Vu' in my previous blog entry. I've been asked to use the more descriptive name Information Retrieval Tool. Download the application and let me know what you think.

Nowadays information is scattered more than ever. For example many people use Twitter, blogs and other social software to read news and to communicate with other people. This makes it very difficult to find certain information again. The focus of this application is to provide mechanisms to easily add information from Twitter and web sites to a personal archive so that it can be easily found later.

When I cleaned up the code I figured how little I actually had to write myself. I only had to write 750 lines of code which includes lines like '<xp:td>'. The size of the code that I had to write is only 31 KB and 8 KB when compressed.

I worked on some other things in parallel but I'd guess it took me between 40 and 60 hours to write this app and that's not because I have superhuman dev skills. The application is also not a production application but I think it demonstrates a couple of things:

NSF as the document based NoSQL database is very powerful to store and manage documents and semi-structured data including built-in features like search and security.

XPages and Designer make it very easy to access data in NSFs and other data stores. The XPages Extension Library allows among other features the easy creation of good looking applications using the OneUI style.

The XPages programming model is open and standards-based. That allows using other Java open source projects. For this application I've used the Jericho HTML parser to get the plain text representation of a web site needed for the full text index.

I've been able to reuse code that is available as open source on OpenNTF: bookmarklet code from Karsten Lehmann, LotusScript code from Andre Guirard, search control from Jun Ling Lee and an icon from Mary Beth Raven. Additionally I've used SiteShoter (freeware) from NirSoft for the image capturing.


Watch a demonstration of the Information Retrieval Tool.

This screenshots shows how to add a web site to the application via a bookmark:

A picture named M2


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