[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.

Replying to myself, another option (which is the same one that Android
Scan/CompareEverywhere uses) would be to move the "scraping" to a
server. This might let me use a single key for all the queries (though
it may still break the terms and conditions, I'd have to look) and would
also reduce on-device processing and the amount of data that needs to be
transferred.

Or we could try hooking into the Android Scan/CompareEverywhere
webservice ;)

Any thoughts?

Cheers,


Simon