Computing @ LOTONtech

More GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS

2009-02-23T11:10:00.001-08:00

In my previous GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS post I forgot to say that it looks like Microsoft Popfly is also going to the wall in the not-too-distant future.

Our PDF e-book "Introduction to Microsoft Popfly, No Programming Required" is now free at www.lotontech.com/computing.

Yahoo! Pipes is alive and kicking, and in my experience it is the best and most popular of the mashup creation tools.

The GOOD NEWS and BAD NEWS of Mashup Development

2009-02-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

First the BAD NEWS:

The Google Mashup Editor beta at www.googlemashups.com is now closed, and the GME itself will be discontinued in favor of the Google App Engine in just a few months time.

Dapper has now been relaunched as an advertising platform rather than a mashup development environment.

Now the GOOD NEWS:

Our PDF e-book Creating Google Mashups with the Google Mashup Editor is now completely free at www.lotontech.com/computing.

You can still use Dapper as a mashup creator at open.dapper.net, and our PDF e-book Mashups Made Easy with Dapper is now completey free at www.lotontech.com/computing.

Yahoo! Pipes is alive and kicking, and in my experience has been -- and continues to be -- by far the most popular mashup development environment.

Happy Mashing!

How to Create Private Yahoo Pipes?

2009-02-11T02:19:00.000-08:00

Jalaj P. Jha has come up with a nice idea for making your Yahoo! Pipes private, so that users can run them but not clone them. Check out his blog posting at http://jalaj.net/2009/02/10/how-to-create-private-yahoo-pipes/.

Reviews of Mashup Development books

2009-01-24T02:03:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to say that some readers have been kind enough to post nice reviews of our mashup development books on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Embedding a Mashup in a Blog or Web Page (with User Inputs)

2008-12-30T04:32:00.000-08:00

(posted originally on 20 November 2008 in our Lulu blog)

I hear people asking variations of this question a lot:

"How can I embed my Yahoo! Pipe in my Blog or Web Page and prompt for User Inputs?"

I have created a "So you'd like to..." guide on Amazon that describes a possible solution.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/syltguides/fullview/RBEFRP8DB4Z3

Joining two tables / feeds using Yahoo! Pipes

2008-12-30T04:17:00.000-08:00

(posted originally on 20 May 2008 in our Lulu blog)

I've noticed in the Yahoo! Pipes forums (http://discuss.pipes.yahoo.com/) a steady stream of people asking essentially the same question:- how to combine information from two feeds so that:

a) Fields are taken from both feeds, and combined into a single output feed.
b) Items are retained from the first feed only if they have a corresponding matching item in the second feed.

In a nutshell, what they want to do is to join the two feeds in the same way that they would join two tables using a SQL statement like this:

SELECT * FROM Table1, Table2
WHERE Table1.keyValue = Table2.keyValue

Here I present a Pipes example where I do just that.

The tables

In this example I have a PUBLISHERS table stored in a CSV file at http://www.btinternet.com/~lotontech/pipes/data/Publishers.csv, and a BOOKS table stored as a CSV file at http://www.btinternet.com/~lotontech/pipes/data/Books.csv.

The PUBLISHERS table contains:

PUBLISHER,URL
LOTONtech,http://www.lotontech.com
Wrox,http://www.wrox.com
Wiley,http://www.wiley.com
SAMS,http://www.sams.com

The BOOKS table contains:

PUBLISHER,BOOK,URL
LOTONtech,Mashup Case Studies with Yahoo! Pipes,http://www.lulu.com/content/2403205
LOTONtech,Creating Google Mashups...,http://search.barnesandnoble.com...
LOTONtech,Working with Yahoo! Pipes,http://www.amazon.com...
LOTONtech,Introduction to Microsoft Popfly,http://www.amazon.com...
Wrox,Professional Visual Studio 2005 Team System,http://www.amazon.com...
Wrox,Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET,http://www.amazon.com...
Wiley,Web Content Mining with Java,http://www.amazon.com...
Apress,Foundations of Popfly,http://www.amazon.com...

The results

My Pipe at http://pipes.yahoo.com/lotontech/cs_selectandjoin shows the result, in which:

The item Title is taken from BOOKS.Book
The hyperlink (if you click on the title) is the book's URL taken from BOOKS.URL
The description is the publisher's web site URL taken from PUBLISHERS.URL

Items are only included where the key values BOOKS.PUBLISHER and PUBLISHERS.PUBLISHER match, so the results exclude publisher SAMS (which appears in PUBLISHERS but not in BOOKS) and Apress (which appears in BOOKS but not in PUBLISHERS).

The Pipes

The basic pattern is to have a Pipe which traverses one of the feeds / tables, which — for each entry — invokes a sub Pipe that traverses the other feed / table.

My Pipe LOTONtech-CS-SelectPublishersJoinBooks at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=ehxw9rcl3RGkb6_InkartA reads the PUBLISHERS CSV file and, for each entry, passes the two fields PUBLISHER and URL into the sub Pipe LOTONtech-CS-SelectBooksJoinPublisher.

My Pipe LOTONtech-CS-SelectBooksJoinPublisher at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=gPCyKrcl3RG9ih2gyp1_DQ reads the BOOKS CSV file and combines into every entry the two fields (from PUBLISHERS) that were passed in; thus forming a cross-product of all possible combinations. Since we don't want all possible combinations, it then filters to retain only those where the PUBLISHER field in BOOKS matches the PUBLISHER field passed in from PUBLISHERS.

Other Considerations

Since the first Pipe (what I call the Outer Loop) reads its file only once, and the second Pipe (what I call the Inner Loop) reads its file each time it is invoked with an entry from the Outer Loop, it should be more efficient to read the longer file (BOOKS) in the Outer Loop and the shorter file (PUBLISHERS) in the Inner Loop. But I didn't think it was so intuitive for my example.

Embedding Yahoo! Pipe Results in a Web Page

2008-12-30T03:06:00.000-08:00

(posted originally on 28 March 2008 in our Lulu blog)

In Chapter 7 of my book Working with Yahoo! Pipes, No Programming Required I described how a Yahoo Pipe's RSS output could be embedded in a web page using an Inline Frame. I also described how user inputs could be captured using a HTML form, to be passed as parameters to the Pipe.

Although I mentioned other third-party offerings for embedding Pipe results in a web page, at the time of writing I didn't include some additional techniques for embedding a Pipe's JSON output directly in a page.

JSON and JavaScript

My model example can been seen by pointing your browser at http://www.btinternet.com/~lotontech/pipes/html/PipeJSON.html

To see how it is done, use your browser's View Source or View Page Source option. Create your own HTML page with exactly the same source code, and simply change my Pipe Id for your own.

Get as a Badge

More recently, Yahoo! has introduced the Get as a Badge feature that you can access from the Pipe's web page; for example at http://pipes.yahoo.com/lotontech/cs_sector_charts

You can choose wether to put the badge on TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, iGoogle, or Embed it in your own web page.

Yahoo! Pipe Embedded in Blogger blog

2008-11-20T02:29:00.001-08:00

This example shows how a Yahoo! Pipe that takes inputs can be embedded in a Blogger blog using a HTML form and an Inline Frame. The same principle would apply equally well to Dapper. To find out more about developing web mashups, visit www.lotontech.com/computing

Dapper Mashup Embedded in Blog Post

2008-11-20T00:22:00.000-08:00

This example shows how a Dapper mashup that takes inputs can be embedded in a Blogger blog using a HTML form and an Inline Frame. The same principle would apply equally well to Yahoo! Pipes. To find out more about developing web mashups, visit www.lotontech.com/computing

Buy this book!

2008-10-27T04:39:00.001-07:00

The book "Win Your Way to Wealth" is now available for purchase by clicking the button below:

Yahoo! Pipe RSS embedded in a Blogger post

2008-07-16T23:56:00.000-07:00

This entry shows how a Yahoo! Pipe's RSS output may be embedded in a Blogger post.

Did you see the content above?

Amazon Books ''Dapp' Embedded in a Blog Post

2008-06-27T05:37:00.000-07:00

This blog entry demonstrates how a Dapper mashup can be embedded in a Blogger blog post.

Did you see the results above?