Day 1 at dev8D 2010 – Pipes lab and lightening talks

I attended the first half of the Pipes lab and following up by catching some of the lightening talks.

Yahoo Pipes notes

About

  • will mash up various data formats; e.g. RSS1, RSS2, atom
  • will normalise out from multiple input formats
  • can output as XML, JSON, stub of PHP, image/media version of feed, etc.
  • each pipe has a unique URI
  • uses a GUI interface, with flow chart style objects, to create new feeds
  • requires a Yahoo account
  • pipes can be claimed or cloned, NB: only an owner can only delete a pipe
  • could a useful tool for useful for examining feeds

Sources of data

  • RSS
  • CSV
  • HTML
  • Yahoo searches/queries
  • existing pipes

Downsides

  • Don’t seem to be able to export the structure of the feed mash up
  • A third party hosted service

Alternatives

The open source version, Deri pipes, can be locally hosted.

Notes on uses of modules Can mash up search RSS feeds (e.g. Plone/WordPress search results) and pass in arguments
– see url builder and user input modules

Bear in mind if using search RSS results these feeds may be paginated or limited to n number of output
– example uses uses search term – url builder – fetch feed – output

Can compound your feeds, i.e. call a search feed for each search result of another feed – see loop function

Private input – protects for instance API keys from cloned pipes
– remember there can be many levels of caching – at source, in yahoo pipes, in your own application

Lightening Talks

I attending lightening talks about WordPress, Teaching programming to non programmers and building Android applications.

Android phone application notes

  • Use Eclipse IDE (plugin may be necessary)
  • Install Android SDK, includes
    • emulator
    • command line tool
    • demo code
  • Uses a locked version of Linux
  • API demos is good demo code to look at

Description of 3D modelling in Android