Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Lew Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Phht! on screenscaping Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2011 08:43:17 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 44 Message-ID: <10974580.2771.1317570197215.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@preb19> References: <4e8676f3$0$291$14726298@news.sunsite.dk> <0qDhq.1519$jh2.616@newsfe19.iad> Reply-To: comp.lang.java.programmer@googlegroups.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 216.239.45.130 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1317570624 14455 127.0.0.1 (2 Oct 2011 15:50:24 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2011 15:50:24 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=216.239.45.130; posting-account=CP-lKQoAAAAGtB5diOuGlDQk0jIwmH0T User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-Google-Web-Client: true Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:8484 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