5.5 World Wide Web interface description

  To allow popular Web browsers to easily interface with the Broker, we implemented a World Wide Web interface to the Broker's query manager and administrative interfaces. This WWW interface, which includes several HTML files and a few programs that use the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), consists of the following:

• HTML files that use Forms support to present a graphical user interface (GUI) to the user;
• CGI programs that act as a gateway between the user and the Broker; and
• Help files for the user.

Users go through the following steps when using a Broker to locate information:

1. The user issues a query to the Broker.
2. The Broker processes the query, and returns the query results to the user.
3. The user can then view content summaries from the result set, or access the URLs from the result set directly.

To provide a WWW-queryable interface, the Broker needs to run in conjunction with an HTTP server. Since installing an HTTP server can sometimes be difficult, you might also want to look at the list of Frequently Asked Questions on the subject. Section 3.5 describes how to configure your HTTP server to work with Harvest.

You can run the Broker on a different machine than your HTTP server runs on, but if you want users to be able to view the Broker's content summaries then the Broker's files will need to be accessible to your HTTP server. You can NFS mount those files or manually copy them over. You'll also need to change the Brokers.cf file to point to the host that is running the Broker.

• HTML files for graphical user interface
• CGI programs
• Help files for the user