FORMAL VS. INFORMAL APIS AND INTEGRATION MECHANISMS
I mentioned in previous sections how the proliferation of formal integration mechanisms in the form of APIs
and XML feeds, for instance, are giving rise to many more mashups and remixed possibilities. It??™s important
to note that you want to depend on not only these formal mechanisms but also on informal mechanisms. Hence
in this book, I??™ll teach you how to look for both formal and informal mechanisms. The example mashups
I describe here use both. I hope to convey to you how to look for those informal hooks.
LibraryLookup Bookmarklet
Let??™s say you find a book at an online bookstore (for example, Amazon), but instead of buying
the book, you want to borrow it from your local library.
Jon Udell??™s LibraryLookup bookmarklet9 makes it easy to jump from the Amazon page to
the corresponding catalog entry in your local library catalog??”via the simple click of a button.
To accomplish the same task without LibraryLookup, you might instead manually re-enter your
search in your local library catalog, which is a tedious task if you have to do it for many books.
LibraryLookup is a bookmarklet, which is ???a small JavaScript program that can be stored
as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers or within hyperlinks on a web
page.???10 A bookmarklet does not require the Greasemonkey extension in Firefox and works in
web browsers other than Firefox.
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