Java Reference
In-Depth Information
This topic uses v1.0 of the Heaton Research Spider which is included with the companion
download of this topic. New releases will likely be available after the publication of this topic.
Adapting to later versions of the spider should be relatively easy as backwards compatibility
is a very important design consideration for the spider.
The Heaton Research Spider is not an immense project. The spider seeks to be as ca-
pable as possible, without including a great deal of overhead. This chapter will show you how
to use the spider.
Using the Heaton Research Spider
In this section you will learn to use the Heaton Research Spider. The Heaton Research
Spider can be configured to perform a wide variety of tasks. There are three primary steps
when using the Heaton Research Spider:
• Configure the spider
• Provide a class for the spider to report its findings
• Start the spider
Configuring the Spider
You will now be shown how to configure the Heaton Research Spider. The Heaton Re-
search Spider is easily configured one of two ways:
• Programmatically (or Directly)
• With a Configuration File
Each of these methods will be discussed in the next two sections.
Configuring the Spider Directly
To configure the Heaton Research Spider you should use the
SpiderOptions
class. The
SpiderOptions
class contains several properties, implemented as public
members. We chose to use public members to allow the class to be quickly loaded from a file
using Java reflection. These properties are shown in Table 13.1.
