ZOIS's Home Web-Server

Stag House, Kirkgate

Welcome to ZOIS Home web-site. This site is visible from the Internet at large and is used for demonstrations and other stuff that can not be easily placed on the main ZOIS site.

ZOIS itself is a small consultancy specializing in large UNIX and Java based On-Line Transaction Processing systems. We would encourage you to read the papers on the ZOIS public site. They give more detailed information on what we do. ZOIS Limited is registered in England, Number 2197775. ZOIS is based in Cockermouth, the Registered Office is 14a, Main St, Cockermouth, CA13 9LQ.

Technology Demonstrators

The primary reason for the 'home' site was to allow demonstrations to be deployed rapidly with the hope of impressing clients and potential clients. Only a few have a link to the front page ...

There are search interfaces to the Examplar elsewhere on this page.

The Jobcentre Plus Examplar

The UK Government's Public Employment Service is known by the moniker 'Jobcentre Plus' and its online presence is currently known as Universal Jobmatch or Jobsearch Direct, depending upon the variable branding that they use. A system was written, original in an indignant response to the closure of the local Jobcentre Plus office, called the Jobcentre Plus Mirror Database. It aimed to provide vacancy data in a timely and better manner than the official site. It depended upon scraping the official site site and then providing a better web interface; RSS, JSON, e-mail feeds and a bulk download. With the advent of the latest version of this Government site, we've been asked to stop. What's left is a neutered example showing, in part, what it used to look like. It's based on a sample database of out-of-date vacancy data, about 100,000 records in size.

This Demonstration uses Linux, GNU, Perl, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP, CSS and As ever, the primary development environment was Emacs.

Some Technical Notes have been made on the nitty-gritty of these things:

TN-2010-11-11

The Jobcentre Plus Mirror Find Interface.

TN-2010-02-17

'Click-through' on Stateful Third Party Web-sites Using PHP.

TN-2009-11-15

Quick and Dirty Ajax.

The Universal Jobmatch Archive

When Universal Jobmatch, the current web-based Public Employment Service in the UK was launched we were specifically not allowed to scrape it; it was the reason why the Examplar exists. About mid-March, 2013 the Terms and Conditions for use changed, allowing scraping once more. The FTP archive is thus running again and one can use a zois.com URL to note otherwise ephemeral postings on the Jobmatch site.

The Cockermouth RSS Portal Page

Original, this page was intended as a demonstration of how a simple RSS fed page can be built to exploit the now defunct JCP Mirror system and its use of RSS. It now stands on its own to show how Javascript can be used to build dynamically loading 'Portal'-like sites. Without Javascript, or with it switched off, the page should appear correctly, if a little less dynamically.

A Technical Notes have been made on this

TN-2011-07-01

Building an Asynchronous Portal using Lightweight HTML Injection.

Looking for the ZoisClock Java J2ME program? This has has now been written up as a Technical Note (TN-2009-10-01) and removed from here. Follow the links in the TN to find it.

Thank you for your interest.

~Z~

Navigation

Jobcentre Plus Examplar Search

We've two search interfaces to the sample database. One based on the local Jobcentre Plus office and the other on an ad-hoc search.

Find your local office: 

Example: "chester".

Or, alternatively, try typing this kind of query: something in somewhere. Everything's optional. Experiment!

Find: 

Example: "painters or plumbers in wakefield".

Please send feedback about these searches.

About the Author

His name is Martin Sullivan. He's a fifty-something some-time computer programmer living in the quaintly named town of Cockermouth in north-west England.

The Company

ZOIS Limited is basically a vehicle for Martin and his OLTP work, he owns it. You can find out more about it elsewhere on the main site.

Pro-Bono Plug

Martin is currently on a health sabbatical, but is interested in the odd bit of pro-bono work by the way of therapeutic recovery. So, if you've anything that he can tackle on a non-commercial basis from his base in Cockermouth please let him know. Unsurprisingly, he's particularly interest in biology, again, and the application of computing to it.