ZOIS's Home Web-Server

[Picture: Stag House]

Stag House, Kirkgate

Welcome to ZOIS Home web-site. This site is visible from the Internet at large and is used an ad-hoc demonstration site, so there's not a lot to see.

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. Although ZOIS is based in Cockermouth, the registered office is 22-26 Nottingham Road, Stapleford, Nottingham NG9 8AA.

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 ...

Jobcentre Plus and Jobseekers Direct Scraping

Originally this was work done in an indignant response to the closure of the local JobcenterPlus office, here in Cockermouth. It has been expanded as a result of positive feedback (see, it does work) to include other regions, and now the whole of the UK (including Northern Ireland). Vacancy details are scraped off various web-sites and stored as a CSV set of files that can be downloaded from our ftp site. In addition there's a canned web-site query for the area around Cockermouth, and an explanation. Nationally, we've found that searching a particular Jobcentre office's vacancies yields better local results than the official Postcode based effort. You can start your search by finding your local Jobcentre office and also read the explanation for this too. As yet, the web interface extends only to England, Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland's official web-site doesn't do that bad job, and we'll leave them to it.

Ask us nicely, and we'll send you the results of our scraping automagically each night. This work currently in a state of flux and is completely under-resourced. So, be gentle with it.

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

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

TN-2010-03-13: Scraping Jobseekers Direct.
TN-2010-02-17: 'Click-through' on Stateful Third Party Web-sites Using PHP.
TN-2009-11-15: Quick and Dirty Ajax.

ZoisClock

A Java Midlet clock on your mobile phone together with a limited explanation.

JAR * JAD

This Demonstration uses Java ME. As ever, the primary development environment was Emacs but builds were accomplished using the J2ME Wireless Toolkit on Linux.

A Technical Note has been written on this:

TN-2009-10-01: Writing a Java Program for a Mobile Phone.

Thank you for your interest.

2010-06-21