jQuery Forum

You can search through the key words and display links to the 60+ pages.

You can’t have 60+ pages loaded into the DOM at one time, unless they are very tiny.

I’ve done the former, and have often run of out browser space when trying to load too much at one time.

I'm assuming you have some kind of database on the server. It would be best to let the database do it's job! Send the search terms to the server, and let the server search the database.

Imagine if you had to download the Amazon catalog to your browser to search for products! But, hey presto! you can search millions of products in an instant, because a powerful server does the job with the right tools.

Absent that, it would be better to download data than pages. Get the data as JSON. You can store it in an object, if it is not too big, or put it in a local database if it is large. You can create simple key-value stores of modest size directly in the browser. But better yet, all of the hybrid platforms (e.g. PhoneGap, etc.) provide a real SQL database locally. (Usually based on SQLite) that can be efficiently searched. You then also have the opportunity to keep the database stored locally, instead of having to download it every time.

This really is not a job for jQuery. And certainly not for jQuery Mobile, which - though you might use it for presentation, has nothing to do with this search.

If you can't have the server search, and you HAVE to scrape your content from your site's HTML pages, you can use a loop with jQuery .ajax(), (instead of loading jQuery Mobiles pages...) parse the content, and then stuff it into a proper local database where it can be searched efficiently.

But better to either have the server do the search, or at least have it format the data into JSON which will make it easy to load into a local database without any scraping nonsense.

You can use your favorite language to do this task. The important part is to make the keyword dictionary and list of links that can be easily searched by javaScript or loaded into a SQLite db or web db.

Because you said you are not a back end developer, this task is not for you to do without suffering from the learning curve. You need to hire an experienced consultant.

 

I think an intern that takes initiative to learn outside and figures out how to do the job will be viewed favorably. And one that asks the right questions will, too. It depends a bit on the company culture. What will not be viewed favorably is going forward blindly with a bad solution without checking along the way to see if it really makes sense.

I would ask these questions. Maybe you already know the answers.

1. Will the webserver continue to be maintained, or will it be retired?

2. Is the data periodically updated, or is it static? Where is it updated now, and where will it be updated going forward?

3. Is the intention to deliver an app with the data built-in, or to get the data from a server on first start?

4. Will the app need to keep it's data up-to-date? Will it need to be periodically refreshed? Is it desired to incrementally update the data in the app without having to download everything?

5. Can you change the server so that it can generate JSON as well as XML? 

6. Can you use middleware to convert the XML to JSON? (JSON is a lot easier to use in an app than XML!)

Probably too many questions or too few will be seen as negative. No questions and a bad solution will definitely be seen as negative. But realize that you are there as an intern in order to learn something of the real world of software development from active practitioners. Take advantage of that opportunity! You are not there to save the world on your own, and aren't expected to!