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

[From: Jody Fanning]

On 15.10.2009 10:57, Simon Pickering wrote:
>    
>>> 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.
>
> Cheer
>    
I'm pretty sure you are able to share the key. I do have an AWS account 
and have used it for my own stuff (in Java though). But all those 
applications around must have a key embedded since they never ask you to 
register yourself. There must be some other open source applications 
around that fetch data from Amazon using AWS.

Amazon did make things a little more complicated a few months ago 
though. All requests must be signed, but they generally provide code 
samples for how to do everything. One thing is to check the licensing of 
the interfaces. There was something recently about different licensing 
between mobile devices and other uses that came up with the iPhone. But 
the advantage is that you won't have any problem with the page layout 
breaking things. Plus their APIs provide pretty much every detail about 
an item you could think of.

Jody