Friday, April 12, 2002

Google glue for: PHP, Ruby, C++, Tcl, Movable Type. More here.  [Scripting News] 11:28:29 PM

"Google Web APIs" [Daypop Top 40] 11:26:32 PM

Google web services. Google: Google Web APIs. SDK. Here's how to call it from Python: Update: ignore the code sample below; download PyGoogle, a friendly wrapper for the Google web API. Comprehensive documentation inside. Later: Early versions did not work with Python 2.2; this was fixed in 0.3. Version 0.4 adds support for doGetCachedPage and doSpellingSuggestion. Package includes updated version of SOAP.py with critical bug fixes necessary to access Google functions; remove any previous versions of SOAP.py (like the one you got from Sourceforge) from your Python library path. Ignore the rest of this, look at the examples in PyGoogle instead... First, get a license key. Second, download SOAP.py and put it in your library search path somewhere (like site-packages). Then call it like this: >>> import SOAP >>> server = SOAP.SOAPProxy('http://api.google.com/search/beta2', namespace='urn:GoogleSearch') >>> soapfalse = SOAP.booleanType(0) >>> data = server.doGoogleSearch( LICENSE_KEY_GOOGLE_SENT_YOU, SEARCH_STRING, 0, 10, soapfalse, '', soapfalse, '', '', '') >>> [node._asdict for node in data.resultElements] This gives you your search results as a list of dictionaries which each look like this (this example is the first result searching for "diveintomark"): {u'URL': 'http://diveintomark.org/', u'cachedSize': '21k', u'directoryCategory': , u'directoryTitle': '', u'hostName': '', u'relatedInformationPresent': 1, u'snippet': 'diveintomark. Monday, April 08, 2002. ... Copyright 2002 Mark Pilgrim Powered by Movable Type 2.0 Dive Into Python | Dive Into OS X | diveintomark | resume. ', u'summary': '', u'title': 'diveintomark'} All those additional arguments passed to doGoogleSearch will be documented in the PyGoogle wrapper module I will be releasing later this evening. Share and enjoy. [diveintomark] 11:24:34 PM

SOAP security and external underwear. I'm sure Paul Kulchenko will soon fix the SOAP::Lite vulnerability that was just noticed. [Jon's Radio] 11:21:44 PM

Three reasons Google Web Services are great (if you don't get this now, you will...): 1) I have a ton storage space (even on my shitty laptop -- also known as MSLT).  I want to get data I think is important down to my desktop (it's a trivial storage issue).  I also have tons of excess horsepower.  Most of my apps chew up less than 5% of my processor's power.  I want this expensive processor to do something or its not worth upgrading (hello Intel!!).  Getting data on a regular basis from Google and other sources uses these resources.  It also, most importantly, allows me to manipulate it locally, using powerful desktop tools. 2) Microsoft, BEA, and IBM (except for Sam Ruby and his work on Axis for Apache) aren't needed to make this happen.  Without the big cos at the center of things, this paradigm scales and takes off. 3) I want to be able to publish the data I get (to my Intranet or the Web).  Radio does that for me.  I can leverage a desktop app that allows me to add annotations to the data I collect.  Imagine this applied to everything that changes often: sales data, inventory data, financial data (both corporate and from someplace like Yahoo finance), and systems data.  I would now have the ability to see the data (in real-time -- hello Vinod!), manipulate it using whatever business process I import as a tool (Radio tools are both easy to build and install -- just drop the tool in a folder), and publish the result. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 11:20:06 PM

Conspiracy to create 'Cisco of China'. Lucent trade secrets case extended [The Register]   This is scary stuff.  I was talking to a friend last year, who is very high up in Nortel about a visit he made to China.  Government spies stole his laptop and detained/questioned him for a week -- all in an attempt to rip off trade secrets.  They returned his laptop and passport and let him leave after things escalated.  Very aggressive. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 11:18:43 PM

James Snell: It's not a debate, Sam and I are just seeing the issue from two different points of view, both of which are equally valid. Personally, I think that it is time for James to take a vacation.  The actual sentence in the original article that jumped out at me: WSDL version indication is done via the targetNamespace attribute of the definitions element. This namespace gives the SOAP messages meaning by relating the messages to a specific bit of code implemented somewhere on the server. The net of the article is to make a specific recommendation about how one should change values in the abstract definition of a service based on how one particular SOAP implementation choses to dispatch in order to address an important issue such as versioning. By the way - thanks to Dare, I've been in contact with the author of this paper, and he seems like a reasonable guy who is willing to listen and work through this, once he returns from TechEd.  A place I would like to be, and probably would have gone to had I been given enough notice, not because I am interested in the kool-aid (I'm up to date on my shots and am fully immunized), but because of all the kool people who are there: Mike, Keith, Jonathan, Don, Brad, and doubtless countless others, including Scott. [Sam Ruby] 11:16:27 PM

Google created a new API. Now what? There in fact were two major announcements yesterday that will have a large impact on those interested in the commercial possibilities of turning Web Spiders into Web Services. The first was clearly Google API. No question this increases awareness. But the comparitively quieter announcement made yesterday will in all likelihood have at least a long lasting impact on making all this real [Sam Ruby] 10:55:47 PM

Inspired by Rael, the Related: logs on the right are now generated by Google.  Note: I initially tried the google.macros.box, but what I got was pretty much "Sam Ruby, Sam Ruby, Sam Ruby, ..."  Booring. [Sam Ruby] 10:54:39 PM

Jython Tips for Python Programmers. Ten tips on using Jython, especially for Python programmers, from the co-author of Jython Essentials. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 10:53:31 PM

Web Services - An Executive Summary. This executive summary from O'Reilly Research's report, "Planning for Web Services," gives a high level overview of the promises and pitfalls of web services. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 10:53:12 PM

[Technology Review - Software] A.I. Reboots. "Artificial intelligence" used to mean robots that think like people; now it means software for rejecting junk e-mail. Low expectations could yield better applications, sooner. 10:51:46 PM

[Joel on Software] According to the New York Times, Microsoft has pretty much abandoned their plans to centralize everyone's personal data. 10:48:54 PM

IBM beefs up Web Services Toolkit [IDG InfoWorld] 10:48:18 PM

MS, IBM propose SOAP security kit for Web services. Flexible, extensible, maybe even sensible? [The Register] 10:47:58 PM