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Re: Phht! on screenscaping

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Arved Sandstrom wrote:
> Roedy Green wrote:
>> If we had a common API to get info about a book from a store, this
> > programming task would be trivial and would not require constant
> > maintenance. Further, it would not fail in production.  No bookstore
>> gives any warning that is changing the format of its pages, or is
>> adding or changing wordings.
>> 
>> Further, you would not need to deal with many languages in your code.
>> 
>> It would not be that hard to come up with a format of the file and an
>> API to fetch it, and even write a sample client and server app. The
>> hard part is political, selling it.  Perhaps Google might ask its
>> customers to implement it, or the ISBN people.
>> 
>> Perhaps somebody has already done that. It would just take inquiries
>> to bookstore asking them the URL to access the XXX API.
>> 
> You have described the problem well. I am no expert in this domain, but
> two existing APIs that stand out in this discussion are the Google Books
> API (http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/v1/getting_started.html) and
> the Amazon Product Advertising API
> (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html).
> 
> For example, in the Amazon API the ItemSearch and SimilarityLookup web
> service operations are just your ticket. Google Books API has 'list' and
> 'get' as REST actions.
> 
> Neither of these actually help our problem; they are just examples of
> what we would like to have. You're right that the problem is primarily
> political; it's getting myriad bookstores to adopt a Simple Bookstore API.
> 
> It's not completely trivial technologically, though: your WSDL will be
> uniform, but you'd need to write and provide implementations for PHP and
> Java and all your other target languages. And _those_ implementations
> would probably need to be written as SPIs, so that appropriate code in
> each bookstore's backend logic (for their existing website) can be
> identified and plugged in (likely with adapters).

http://xkcd.com/927/

-- 
Lew

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Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-09-30 09:04 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:10 -0700
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:24 -0700
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping markspace <-@.> - 2011-09-30 10:30 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-09-30 10:40 -0700
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:19 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 21:21 -0400
  Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-09-30 22:53 -0300
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-09-30 22:11 -0400
      Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-01 09:09 -0300
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-10-01 15:48 -0400
        Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Movable Hype <mhype101@snortwad.net> - 2011-10-02 03:40 +0000
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Arved Sandstrom <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> - 2011-10-02 10:20 -0300
            Re: Phht! on screenscaping Lew <lewbloch@gmail.com> - 2011-10-02 08:43 -0700
              Re: Phht! on screenscaping Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.nospam@virtualinfinity.net> - 2011-10-02 16:22 -0700
          Re: Phht! on screenscaping Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2011-10-02 12:11 +0000
    Re: Phht! on screenscaping Roedy Green <see_website@mindprod.com.invalid> - 2011-10-01 19:03 -0700

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