USING SPEAGRAM
Learning and Experimenting with Speagram
To use Speagram you have to spend a short time to get used to the way data and transformations are specified. It is not hard to understand and going through the first two parts of our tutorial should be enough to start working. You can come back later to learn more advanced features as you need them.
When using Speagram for the first time you might want to look at the expressions which are built into Speagram or those present in the core library. We think it's better to read through the tutorial and learn to use Speagram by examples, but we prepared as a reference this complete list of built-in and core expressions.
After you have learnt the basics of Speagram you should definitely try our live interface. Go ahead and create your own web Speagram file. Enter your grammar there and see Speagram parse expressions for you. This is a good exercise and later you will be able to use this grammar from your own website.
Integrating Speagram with your own Applications
When you are comfortable with using Speagram from our website you might want to integrate Speagram grammars into your own website. In this way you can let the users of your site enter queries and text in a natural way, have it parsed and simplified by Speagram and let your webserver backend programs process only the resulting XML. Learn how to access Speagram from PHP with simple GET or POST queries so you can use it from your own website. We would like to have a web service instead of this simple GET/POST API but we found no time so far to implement it. If you are willing to help, just contact us.
When you already know how to access Speagram you might wonder how to build something useful with it. We prepared a complete example to show you how parsing text with Speagram, processing it with XSLT and sending the resulting XML to other open source tools can be done. In this way you will learn how to build a simple music parsing, generation and printing web application using Speagram for parsing and other open source applications for processing.
Using Speagram from our server has numerous disadvantages and it is not sustainable for larger sites. Therefore if you find Speagram useful and think about integrating it into your systems you should download the Speagram binaries (source code included) and put them on your own server. Similarily, if you are planning to do more complex tasks, lengthy computations or generate and use SRGS grammars with Speagram you should download the binaries and use the appropriate command line options for running Speagram in the console.