This document describes the sample applications that ship with the PIA. PIA applications fall into three basic categories:
The applications currently available are:
The Admin application is the ``server administration'' or ``control panel'' application. It manages all the other applications that make up the PIA Agency. Because Admin is potentially dangerous, the default configuration protects it with the Unix password file, if there is one.
Proxie is the main application in a group of related applications that operate when the PIA is used as a proxy for web browsing. The Proxie family of applications combine to make the PIA a powerful ``web browser's assistant,'' which was the original goal when the PIA was designed.
To use these applications, set your browsers to use your PIA (sometimes referred to as your Personal Information Agency when it's being used in this way) as your proxy. This setting is usually found under the Network options available under edit/preferences, options/network, or some similar menu. You need to specify both the host name and port--8888 by default-- where your agency is running.
All of the Proxie applications are ``agents'' -- they contain pieces of XML code that ``look over your shoulder'' and operate on HTTP requests and responses as they pass through the PIA.
There are two Toolbar applications. The fileTools agent adds a
toolbar to pages served from local files by DOFS applications in the PIA
agency. The remoteTools application adds a toolbar to remote pages proxied
through your agency.
The remoteTools agent is also the agent responsible for
displaying the URL of every HTML page you visit as the output of the
pia command.
The History agent tracks all web pages that you visit from any browser, allowing you to search those URLs by date.
Once you set your Information Agency as your proxy, browse to a few external web pages, then visit the History agent's home page. You should see a link to today's date (e.g. [Hist: / 1998 / 08 / 04]) The last component, the day, is a list of links to all the pages you visited on that day. The month and year are directories corresponding to that month and year.
(The Cache agent may not be functional in versions of the PIA prior to release 2.1; it's still experimental.)
Unlike the History agent, which saves only URL's, the Cache agent saves entire pages. This can take up a lot of space, but it can speed things up if you go back to a page you've visited recently. Eventually we want to be able to display the differences if a page has changed since the last time you visited it.
The SimpleCalendar application is a simple appointment calendar with day, month, and year views, storing both one-time and repeating events as XML files in a simple directory tree.
The View application lets you view documents after those document are processed with a tagset or script. Three of the ``views'' provided are as raw text, as a ``slide'' presentation, and as the documentation for a ``tagset''.
The Tutorial application gives you an interactive tutorial in the PIA's XML-based document-processing language; it is also available from the PIA demonstration server.
This application serves as both a demonstration and testbed for the PIA's executable tag markup language and its formatter/interpreter. Its home page provides links to pages that show examples of tag usage. It is more like a reference manual than a tutorial.
The PIA/Contrib directory is
intended for applications, documentation, and tools contributed by members
of the PIA developer community.
These are the applications we expect you and information developers like you to develop.
Note that the PIA's license allows you to build your own private applications using the PIA; you don't have to contribute them back to the community if you don't want to (although we would prefer it if you did). This is because the PIA's applications are considered documents rather than source code.