1. Jul 6th, 2006

    The UI is the API: Scraping with Ruby @ Mashup Camp II

    Knife Scraper 2.jpg

    We interrupt this blog for a special announcement.

    Time to drop the SOAP, take a rest from XML and come explore the granddaddy of wide scale messaging protocols: HTML/HTTP.

    It’s great for UI, but did you know it’s also an API?

    Once I run out of colorful metaphors, I’m going to show you how to get eBay listing data in 10 lines of Ruby code. And give you a run down of the scrAPI toolkit for Ruby, which is going 1.0 next week (2.0 if you count uformatparser).

    And of course, we’ll talk about microformats, functional testing, your favorite Web 2.0 supersites, and some lessons from scraping in the real world (*cough*comments*cough*).

    Oh, and we do it all with style(*). If you don’t know what that means, show up and find out.

    This is all happening day one of Mashup Camp, sometime after lunch (watch the board), for 30 minutes because we all have mashups to build. And if I didn’t mention before, we’re giving away free source code(**)!!

    * Credit where credit is due.

    ** And yes, that’s code used in production. And yes, free in spirit as in spirits.

    Posted by Assaf Filed in general

    1. Jul 10th, 2006

      Annoyingly Cheerful » Blog Archive » MashupUniversity

      [...] The main thing I’m looking forward to is Assaf Arkin’s session on scrAPIs. I’m a fan of his blog, which is always interesting and entertaining, but that’s not all: he has also written a microformats parser. I really, really, really tried to get it to work when Bill and I were coding WEvent at the last SuperHappyDevHouse, and I regret to report that I failed miserably. I’m hoping to get a chance to ask Assaf how it works; knowing me, it’s probably something painfully obvious that I’ve overlooked. [...]

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