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Re: Phht! on screenscaping

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On 11-10-01 11:22 PM, Roedy Green wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Oct 2011 09:09:31 -0300, Arved Sandstrom
> <asandstrom3minus1@eastlink.ca> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted
> someone who said :
> 
>> Besides, assuming it was legal, *Roedy* could offer the API as a
>> service. He's the aggregating screenscraper, does all the heavy-lifting,
>> and other people can query *his* web service
> 
> there are all kinds of companies doing just that, though they don't
> think of themselves that way.
> 
> See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/bookstores.html
> 
> There are many services that let you find out which bookstores carry a
> given book.  If you order through them, they get a finder's fee.
> 
> They have my problem magnified many times, since they may be polling
> 200+ bookstores.  I poll only 20.
> 
> 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).

AHS
-- 
I tend to watch a little TV... Court TV, once in a while. Some of the
cases I get interested in.
-- O. J. Simpson

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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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