December 2022 – Page 3

December 9, 2022

8 Best Web Crawlers To Get Better Data

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Crawlers are such essential tools on the Internet today that imagining a world without them would make navigating the web a different experience. Web crawlers assist in the operation of search engines, serve as the brains behind web archives, assist content creators in finding out what content is copyrighted, and assist website owners in identifying which pages on their sites require attention.

You can accomplish a lot with web crawlers that would be difficult or impossible without them. If you need to collect data from the Internet, you might need to use web crawlers at some point as a marketer. However, choosing a suitable web crawler for your needs may be difficult. It is because, unlike web scrapers, you can find a lot of general-purpose scrapers; you will need to dig deeper to find web crawlers. The reason is that most popular web crawlers are usually specialized.

We’ve compiled the top 8 web crawler tools with their features and pricing for you in this article.

1. Crawlbase

Crawlbase provides crawling and scraping services to people who wish to crawl data at a large scale and maintain the most significant level of anonymity throughout the process. The Crawler allows you to crawl any website or platform on the Internet. You will be able to benefit from proxy support, captcha bypass, as well as the ability to crawl JavaScript pages with dynamic content.

The crawler is a pay-as-you-go model with no hidden fees, so you only pay for successful requests. The first 1,000 requests are free, and you will be informed of the exact cost based on how many requests you make. A monthly pricing calculator makes calculating your price relatively easy, as you only pay for successful requests, and if there are any unsuccessful requests, you will not be charged.

Features:

The company provides a wide range of scraping services
A headless browser is supported for rendering JavaScript
They only charge you for successful crawling
Geo-targeting supported by a lot of countries
It has a pool of over one million IP addresses
Smart rotation of IP address
The number of successful requests determines the price
1000 Free requests for new users

2. Nokogiri

Nokogiri is an open-source software library for parsing HTML and XML in Ruby. Libxml2 and libxslt provide the functionality of the library.

Nokogiri provides a comprehensive API for reading, writing, editing, and querying documents. The tool simplifies the process of working with XML and HTML for Ruby developers. Nokogiri is based on two fundamental principles. As a first step, it automatically treats all documents as suspicious. Second, it does not attempt to correct the behavioral differences detected between parsers.

Features:

DOM Parser for XML, HTML4, and HTML5
SAX Parser for XML and HTML4
A document search tool based on CSS3 selectors, with some jQuery-like extensions
Validation of XSD Schemas
XSLT transformation
” Builder” DSL for XML and HTML
Push Parser for XML and HTML4
Completely free.
Good XML and HTML parser for Ruby.
Superior security.

3. UiPath

UiPath is an end-to-end robotic process automation tool. It provides solutions to automate routine office activities to accelerate business change.

UiPath has built-in capabilities for performing additional crawls. It is particularly effective when dealing with complex user interfaces. It can easily extract data in tabular or pattern form from multiple different web pages. The screen scraping tool can extract individual text components, groups of text, blocks of text, and data in a table format.

Features:

By streamlining processes, identifying efficiencies, and providing insights, we can achieve fast digital transformation at reduced costs.
A UiPath robot follows your exact requirements to ensure compliance. Using Reporting, you can view your robot’s documentation at any time.
If you standardize your methods, your outcomes will be more effective and successful.
Crawling of web and desktop data with intelligent automation.
It is not necessary to have any programming knowledge in order to create web agents.
It is capable of handling both individual and group text elements.
Easily manages complex user interfaces.

4. Webharvy

The Webharvy tool includes a point-and-click interface for scraping web pages. It is designed for people who aren’t programmers. Using WebHarvy, you can automatically scrape text, images, URLs, and emails from websites. You can access target websites via proxy servers or a VPN.

Features:

Pattern Detection.
You can save it to a file or a database.
Keyword submission.
Handle pagination.
It is easy to use.
Keyword-based extraction.
VPN support is included.
The crawling scheduler is impressive.

5. Import.io

Import.io is a platform that facilitates the conversion of semi-structured web pages into structured data, which can be used for a variety of purposes, ranging from business decision-making to integration with apps.

They provide real-time data retrieval through their JSON REST-based and streaming APIs and support integration with a variety of common programming languages and data analysis tools.

It is great for businesses and marketing research that wants organized data. There are multiple programming languages that can be used with the software. The crawler’s point-and-click interface makes it easy to use.

Features:

Point-and-click training
Automate web interaction and workflows
Easy Schedule data extraction
Support almost every system
The integration of multiple languages is seamless.
Pricing flexibility.

6. Zyte

Zyte is another web crawler designed for developers who are proficient in coding. The tool offers several features that enable users to quickly extract information from websites across the Internet.

Crawlera, a sophisticated proxy rotator utilized by Zyte, allows users to crawl large sites and bot-protected pages without worrying about bot countermeasures. Users can crawl from multiple IP addresses and locales through a simple HTTP API without maintaining proxy servers.

Features:

Content Planning
Keyword tracking
Website accessibility testing
Content auditing
Automatically build sitemaps.

7. Open Search Server

The OpenSearchServer software is based on Lucene and is a powerful, enterprise-class search engine solution. You can easily and quickly integrate full-text search capabilities into your application by utilizing the web user interface, crawlers, and JSON web services.

It is a good tool for crawling websites and building search indexes. Additionally, it provides text extracts and auto-completion features that can be used to create search pages. Depending on your needs, the software will allow you to select from six different scripts to download.

Features:

Crawlers can index everything.
The classifications are made automatically.
This is a free, open-source tool.
There is a wide range of search functions available.

8. Dexi.io

The Dexi.io web scraping tool allows businesses to extract and transform data from any web source through advanced automation and intelligent mining technologies.

You can scrape or interact with data from any website using Dexi.io. You can use three types of robots: Extractors, Crawlers, and Pipes. An advanced feature set and APIs enable you to combine and transform data into robust datasets.

Features:

Automatic Data Capture.
Location-based analytics.
Category Analytics.
Highly customizable.
you can create your own agents
The data is automatically deduplicated before it is sent to your systems.

Conclusion

We discussed some of the best Crawlers available in marketing with their top features to help you crawl available online data according to your own needs. Let us know which crawler tool worked the best for you in the comments below.

The post 8 Best Web Crawlers To Get Better Data appeared first on noupe.

noupe

December 8, 2022

Mario Heads to the Mushroom Kingdom In the First Super Mario Bros. Movie Clip

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At tonight’s Game Awards, Keegan Michael-Key (the voice of Toad in the Mario movie) introduced the world to the first extended clip from Super Mario Bros. The Movie, giving us a taste of Illumination’s take on the lands of the Mushroom Kingdom.

[Editor’s Note: This article is part of the developing story. The information cited on this page may change as the breaking story unfolds. Our writers and editors will be updating this article continuously as new information is released. Please check this page again in a few minutes to see the latest updates to the story. Alternatively, consider bookmarking this page or sign up for our newsletter to get the most up-to-date information regarding this topic.]

Mario Heads to the Mushroom Kingdom In the First Super Mario Bros. Movie Clip

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PhpStorm 2022.3 is released with a new UI, PHP 8.2 support, and more

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PhpStorm, the PHP IDE by JetBrains, released version 2022.3 this week with a new UI, PHP 8.2 support, quick-fix previews, code vision, reader mode for PHPDocs, and more.

This release contains impressive major improvements and plenty of small quality-of-life improvements. Here’s the gist of everything noteworthy, with a link to the full announcement post below for the full list of everything:

New UI (preview)
PHP 8.2 support, such as readonly classes, deprecated dynamic properties, type system improvements, and more.
Code vision – shows things like codeowners, usage, and the number of implementations of interfaces
Quick-fix preview
Reader mode for PHPDoc blocks
Improved quick documentation
Datetime format preview
Database: Redis support
Run tests with ParaTest
Run single data sets with PHPUnit’s data providers
Use external format tools like PHP CS Fixer or PHP Codesniffer
Prophecy mocking support
Blade improvements
And more

This PhpStorm release is impressive, and I love all the new improvements. The new UI is beautiful and feels new!

While all these new features are exciting, we are Laravel News after all! So what has improved in PhpStorm for Laravel specifically?

There were two things mentioned specifically for Blade:

Closing directives will now be automatically closed when possible.
Code usage detection has also improved in Blade files, so you should see less false highlighting on usage.

Learn more

If you like a visual, PhpStorm dev advocate Brent Roose walks through what’s new in this video:

VIDEO

For the full release announcement, check out the PhpStorm 2022.3 announcement post.

Laravel News

December 7, 2022

Iceburg CRM

Iceburg CRM is a metadata driven CRM that allows you to quickly prototype any CRM. The default CRM is based on a typical business CRM but the flexibility of dynamic modules, fields, subpanels allows prototyping of any number of different tyes of CRMs.Laravel News Links

December 6, 2022

Reading QR codes with Laravel and increasing the QR reading rate with image processing

https://miro.medium.com/max/785/1*0IwO0VtN3Oi6Laj5m410YA.pngA comprehensive article on QR code reading with Laravel and increasing read rate with image processingLaravel News Links

December 6, 2022

Apple Music now offers a karaoke mode

You don’t need Spotify or a dedicated app to try karaoke at home. Apple Music has introduced a Sing feature that lets you take over the vocals. You can not only adjust the voice levels, but use multiple lyric views depending on what you want to belt out — you can perform a duet or even handle background duties. Apple also notes that the lyric views are now cued to the beat and light up slowly, so it’s easier to know when you should draw out a verse.

The feature will be available worldwide for "tens of millions" of tracks later in December on the new Apple TV 4K as well as recent iPhones (iPhone 11 and later) and iPads (such as last year’s 9th-generation model). Android supports real-time lyrics, but won’t let you adjust vocal levels. Accordingly, Apple Music plans to share more than 50 playlists devoted to songs "optimized" for the Sing feature. Don’t be surprised if karaoke staples from Queen and other artists make the cut.

Spotify rolled out a karaoke feature in June, but with a very different focus. While Apple Music Sing is clearly aimed at parties, its Spotify counterpart is more of a gaming experience that records your voice and rates your performance. Apple tells Engadget its feature doesn’t use microphones at all, so you won’t have to worry if your version of "Islands in the Stream" needs some polish.

There’s no mystery behind the addition. Sing gives you another reason to use Apple Music in group settings — it’s not just for soundtracking your latest soirée. It could also serve as a selling point for the Apple TV, where music has rarely been a major priority. While this probably won’t replace the karaoke machine at your favorite bar, it might offer a good-enough experience for those times when you’d rather stay home.

Engadget

December 5, 2022

Terminal Aliases: Shorten “php artisan” to Whatever [VIDEO]

I’ve seen people optimize their typing experience by assigning Terminal aliases to their most used Artisan commands. Let me show you.Laravel News Links

December 4, 2022

Save 1.2 million queries per day with Laravel Eager Loading

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Since various elements of the Inspector backend rely on Laravel, I worked a lot with the ORM component myself, and its Eager Loading features.

The tradeoff in using an ORM always remains tremendously positive for developers. Laravel Eloquent (the Laravel’s ORM) has meant for me a huge increase in productivity and flexibility in building Inspector.

But it’s a technical tool. As our application grows or is subject to ever higher load, we need to improve the use we make of our technology stack.

As I always say to my collaborators “it’s a good thing”. It’s because the business is growing.

I’m Valerio, software engineer and CTO at Inspector. In this article I’ll show you how I saved 1.2 million queries per day using Eager Loading correctly.

Let’s first clarify what eager loading in Laravel means before continuing.

Eager Loading in Laravel

Working with databases is incredibly easy thanks to object relational mapping (ORM). Although querying related model data is made simple by object-oriented definitions of database relationships, developers could overlook the underlying database calls

Eloquent is part of Laravel and makes working with your database fun.

How is the ORM expected to understand your intentions, after all?

Eager Loading means you get all of the required data at the same time. In contrast, Lazy Loading only retrieves related things when they are actually needed and only gives you one item at a time.

Let me show you a real life example. Consider a database with two tables: posts and comments.

A post naturally contains numerous comments since all comments have a post_id field on them that links them to the corresponding posts (1 to N relation or hasMany).

Below there are the Post and Comment Eloquent models.

namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Post extend Model
{
    /**
     * The comments associated to the post.
     */
    public function comments(): HasMany
    {
	return $this->hasMany(Comment::class);
    }
}

namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Comment extend Model
{
    /**
     * The Post that own the comment.
     */
    public function comments(): BelongsTo
    {
	return $this->belongsTo(Post::class);
    }
}

Let’s say that the posts table contains 10 items. To access all posts, we just need to:

$posts = Post::all();

Then, to get every comment connected to a post, we might do something like this:

foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->comments->count();
}

The initial query will run once to retrieve all the posts, followed by further 10 requests to retrieve the corresponding comments. The total number of queries is now 11.

Putting posts in a foreach loop N stands for the number of rows retrieved from the posts table, which in this case is 10, plus one related to the comments relation, so the formula utilized is N + 1.

That is nothing more than lazy loading. However, with eager loading, we only need to run two queries to retrieve the 10 posts and their comments.

$posts = Post::with('comments')->get();
foreach ($posts as $post){
    echo $post->comment->count();
}

We have concurrently loaded all 10 posts and their comments using the “with” method. Eloquent will hydrate the internal comment property of the post model, so when you use it in your code it won’t run a new query but can rely on previously fetched data. This will avoid the additional (+1) query on each post’s iteration.

Since various elements of the Inspector backend system rely on it, I worked a lot with this framework’s component myself. Later I will explain how I saved more than 1 million queries per day using this technique.

Eager Loading Multiple Relationships

Let’s imagine that our Post model has another relationship, such as Category:

namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class Post extend Model
{
    /**
     * The category that own the post.
     */
    public function category(): HasMany
    {
	return $this->belongsTo(Category::class);
    }
	
    /**
     * The comments associated to the post.
     */
    public function comments(): HasMany
    {
	return $this->hasMany(Comment::class);
    }
}

We can simply retrieve the relationships without our code needing to hit the database repeatedly:

$posts = Post::with('comments', 'category')->get();
foreach ($posts as $post) {
    echo "Category name is {$post->category->name}";
    foreach ($post->comments as $comment){
        echo "Comment is {$comment->message}";
    }
}

Useful if you plan to loop for more relationships during the rest of the execution.

There are many other options you can use to take advantage from this feature, so I strongly recommend that you consult the official documentation for all possible configurations:

https://laravel.com/docs/master/eloquent-relationships#eager-loading

How I saved 1.2 million queries per day with Laravel Eager Loading

Recently we decided to rely on a Cache layer in order to offload the SQL database from some queries that are executed millions of times every day.

The cache layer is structured following the Repository Pattern. You can read more about our implementation in the article below:

Following the same schema of the example above with posts and comments, our users can have multiple subscription plans.

In the cache layer we cache the result of the query below:

public function get($id): User
{
    return User::with('plans')->findOrFail($id);
}

But later we used the “plans” relation to retrieve the most recent subscription as below:

if ($this->hasSubscription()) {
    return $this->plans()->first();
}

Here was the bug.

In order to use the eager loaded plans we have to use the $this->plans property not the method.

Invoking $this->plans() Eloquent will run the query again.

It was enough to remove the parentheses from the statement to tell Eloquent to use preloaded records and avoid the execution of 1.2 million queries per day.

if ($this->hasSubscription()) {
    return $this->plans->first();
}

In the image below you can see the magnitude of reduction in the number of queries per second.

Laravel Eager loading inspector monitoring

Conclusion

The advantage of eager loading over lazy loading is that everything is available at once. Users experience no lag when obtaining data, and the number of queries they send to the database is drastically reduced.

The cons are:

The initial query takes a little more time to run
Naturally loading more records needs more memory
And more bandwidth to transmit more data

Try Inspector for free as you long as you want

As a busy developer, the time and money it saves you when it comes to monitoring and error detection is worth 10x more than the monthly subscription!

Inspector is usable by any IT leader who doesn’t need anything complicated. If you want good automation, deep insights, and the ability to forward alerts and notifications into your messaging environment try Inspector for free.

Or learn more on the website: https://inspector.dev

Laravel News Links

December 4, 2022

Laravel Advanced – Lateral Join Implementation In Laravel

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Dt6mq97MmtM/maxresdefault.jpgHere, we will be looking at Lateral Join and how to implement it in Laravel. Basically, lateral join is forEach for MySQL.Laravel News Links