[maemo-developers] mbarcode/maemo-barcode dialog oddity and progress report

[From: Simon Pickering]

> > For 1D codes mbarcode will attempt a very basic webscrape of Amazon and
> > will (hopefully) return a title (rather than a segfault). For URLs
> > encoded in a QR code/datamatrix it will open the webbrowser and for
> > vCards it will add them to your contacts.
> 
> Why is it necessary to do a "webscrape" of Amazon. Amazon has plenty  
> of simple APIs for getting data freely and easily. The REST based ones  
> are extremely simple and you get back an XML document with everything  
> you need.

It quite possibly isn't necessary, this is certainly not my area of
expertise, just something I wanted to get working ASAP. When I looked at
how to do this I found a mixture of web scraping tools and ones that use
Amazon Web Services. AFAIK AWS requires that you register to obtain a
key, and I'm not sure of the exact terms and conditions, but I presume
they will not want me to share my key, but I may be wrong about this.

I guess you're also talking about AWS? What is your take on the key
issues - share mine, or get each user to register themselves and get a
key? Perhaps the registration could be automated. Any thoughts? Patches
welcome of course.

Cheers,


Simon