The robot development environment for Kapow Enterprise products is very similar to what is provided in the Kapow OnDemand product. Robots are designed using the same powerful and intuitive visual scripting approach. The programmability options and the way the robot designer interacts with web pages to harvest web content is also very similar.
The key difference is that the Enterprise products are designed to support a wider range of styles of web harvesting and different ways to use the data once it's been harvested.
Examples of product-specific additional functionality supported in the robot development environment for Enterprise products:
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Ability to clip partial page, full page, or multi-page web content and deploy as a portlet to popular commercial portal servers (e.g., IBM, BEA, Oracle) |
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Direct read/write capability to SQL databases, such as Oracle, DB2, MySQL, Sybase, SQL Server |
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Support for calling robots from Java or .NET applications as a SOAP service through the use of APIs we provide |
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Creation of very complex data object models, with unlimited support for the number of name/value pairs and the ability to create composite data objects by combining data harvested from databases and internal or external web data sources |
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This additional set of capabilities is very rich and powerful, but it does add additional complexity to the robot development environment. While robots used in the OnDemand product can be designed by web-savvy individuals, robots designed for use with the Enterprise product typically require and individual with a more traditional developer skill set.
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