org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html";
print md5($url);
?>
yields 53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5.
CHAPTER 2 ?– UNCOVERING THE MASHUP POTENTIAL OF WEB SITES 57
Note that the following:
http://del.icio.us/url?url=http://harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html
also does work and redirects to the following:
http://del.icio.us/url/53113b15b14c90292a02c24b55c316e5
Screen-Scraping and Bots
The focus of this book is on creating mashups using public APIs and web services. If you want
to mash up a web site, one of the first things to look for is a public API. A public API is specifically
designed as an official channel for giving you programmatic access to data and services
of the web site. In some cases, however, you may want to create mashups of services and data
for which there is no public API. Even if there is a public API, it is extremely useful to look
beyond just the API. An API is often incomplete. That is, there is functionality in the user interface
that is not included in the API. Without a public API for a web site, you need to resort to
other techniques to reuse the data and functionality of the application.
One such technique is screen-scraping, which involves extracting data from the user
interface designed for display to human users. Let me define bots and spiders, which often
use screen-scraping techniques. Bots (also known as an Internet bots, web robots, and
webbots) are computer programs that ???run automated tasks over the Internet,??? typically tasks
that are ???both simple and structurally repetitive.
Pages:
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144