Web Scrape with a Mobile Web App?

Question

I recently created a native Android app and one feature it has is pulling some stats/data from an HTML table on a website using jsoup, formats it as a csv and finally pushes the data into a 2D array. The table is updated weekly so this data pull happens often and is not something I want to be manual. It works great but I now would like to create a mobile web app so it can be cross platform and not just Android. Is it possible to have this same functionality using only Javascript, CSS, and HTML5 in a mobile web app? Thanks for any help

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly you will want to craft an API on your webserver that serves up the info you want from your database.

There are many, many ways to do that. My personal preference is crafting one by hand using PHP, but like I said there are several ways of doing this without having to recreate the wheel.

You can use a library like Codeignitor

OR you can use a service like Kimono

Regardless, it needs to be an API that serves up that data preferably as a JSON object.

You can then consume that data (into a view/template/html) via jQuery, Javascript, Backbone.js or Angular.js... take your pick.