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

[From: Simon Pickering]

Hi Jody,

On Thu, 2009-10-15 at 21:42 +0300, Jody Fanning wrote:
> 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.

OK thank you, I'll take a look at this. 

Of course if anyone knows about this and/or wants to submit code
patches, they will be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,


Simon