A Quick Tour of Arachnophilia

Arachnophilia is an advanced Web site development environment, as well as a general programming tool.

Arachnophilia is designed to learn as much as possible from you:
- Arachnophilia's menus and toolbars are programmable.
  - Nearly all Arachnophilia menu and toolbar items are internally represented by a "macro," a user-definable data element that connects a command with a button and a keyboard key.
  - You can add to or edit the macro set, change the content of the commands, and change their keyboard mapping.
  - The macro command can be something you simply want to type at a keystroke, and it can include Arachnophilia system commands and other macros. It can even invoke an external java class to process your documents.
  - You can build entire new toolbars and menu trees.
  - You can display or hide custom menus and toolbars at a keystroke.
  - The macro editor is available, interactively, at all times. You can even right-click toolbar buttons and edit them as you work.
  - Here is an example in which the main toolbar's "NewAuto" button is being edited:
- When you exit Arachnophilia, the program remembers everything. It saves all your macro changes, remembers which documents were open and which choices you made. When you run Arachnophilia again, it restores all your choices and documents.

Arachnophilia can take a Web page you need to edit, which might look like this --


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html> <head> <title> This is my web page! </title>
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Arachnophilia 5.0"> <meta name="FORMATTER" content="Arachnophilia 5.0">
</head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000">
This is my Web page! </body> </html>

— and make it look like this with a keystroke (Ctrl-E):


  1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  2 
  3 <!-- Created on Mar 1, 2002 11:29:01 AM -->
  4 
  5 <html>
  6    <head>
  7       <title>
  8          My web page!
  9       </title>
 10       <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Arachnophilia 5.0"/>
 11       <meta name="FORMATTER" content="Arachnophilia 5.0"/>
 12    </head>
 13 
 14    <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000">
 15 
 16       This is my Web page!
 17 
 18    </body>
 19 </html>
 20

While it is prettying up your page, Arachnophilia will tell you if you have made one of several kinds of trivial HTML errors:

Such an error is trivial, but its consequences may not be. If not corrected, this kind of error may prevent your page from displaying at all on some older browsers.

Arachnophilia has a built-in FTP Service that lets you move your Web site to the Internet:

The FTP Service uses a synchronization method to upload only changed files, saving time and bandwidth.

Arachnophilia's displays are designed to offer as much information as possible:

Here is a typical Web page display (after using Beautify HTML (Ctrl-E)):


  1 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  2 
  3 <!-- Created on Mar 1, 2002 10:48:47 AM -->
  4 
  5 <html>
  6    <head>
  7       <title>
  8          My Web Page!
  9       </title>
 10       <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Arachnophilia 5.0"/>
 11       <meta name="FORMATTER" content="Arachnophilia 5.0"/>
 12    </head>
 13 
 14    <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff0000">
 15 
 16       This is my Web Page!
 17 
 18    </body>
 19 </html>
 20

And a programming display (after using Beautify Code (Ctrl+H)):


  1 /*
  2  *		Created on Feb 28, 2002 3:26:55 PM
  3  */
  4 
  5 /* TestClass is meant to demonstrate the use
  6  * of Arachnophilia's custom class launcher feature.
  7  * Just compile this class in place, create
  8  * a macro that looks like this:
  9  * "[RunCustomClassDoc:CustomClasses/TestClass]",
 10  * load a suitable document, and activate the macro.
 11  * The document/selection will have all its "a" letters
 12  * replaced by "(the letter"a")"
 13  */
 14 
 15 public class TestClass {
 16    
 17    private String searchReplace(String data,String find,String replace)
 18    {
 19       StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
 20       int a = 0,b;
 21       int findLength = find.length();
 22       while((b = data.indexOf(find,a)) != -1) {
 23          sb.append(data.substring(a,b));
 24          sb.append(replace);
 25          a = b + findLength;
 26       }
 27       if(a < data.length()) {
 28          sb.append(data.substring(a));
 29       }
 30       return sb.toString();
 31    }
 32    
 33    // this is the default method that custom classes
 34    // must have to work with Arachnophilia's class
 35    // launcher feature unless a specific method name
 36    // is provided
 37    
 38    public String processString(String s)
 39    {
 40       return searchReplace(s,"a","(the letter\"a\")");
 41    }
 42 }
 43

Also, as these examples show, you can export Arachnophilia's syntax-colored displays as HTML with a few keystrokes. This allows you to post your work on the Web in classic source-listing form.

This is just an overview. Arachnophilia has many more features to make you productive in Web page design and general programming.