Todd Ditchendorf released a Mac application called AquaPath that lets you run XPath expressions against XML and see the results highlighted in the source document.

• Your back end provides key/value pairs like vcard or icalendar.
• Your web view of the data is the corresponding format such as hcard or hcalendar.
• The the web application provides a REST-style interface to GET and POST records.
• Other applications can read the microformat, and either pick off records, or construct the appropriate REST url to GET the current record, or POST changes.

Ernie built a Core Data [ via Backup Brain ] application to populate a database, and hooked up a Ruby on Rails application to the resulting SQLite table to provide the web view.

Badgerbag suggests you run it for a few days.

When I was 2Roam, we had that application. It was called Catalyst. It executed the JavaScript on a page or frameset and cleaned up the results. You got a compound document out the other side with all the HTML, and all the information from the HTTP headers and cookies.

A named xsl:template represents each API method.

After importing Walsh’s XSLT into your style sheet, you call the template with the appropriate parameters, and it returns the method’s XML response.

You’ll need an API key and a Flickr account in order to play.

• Jon Udell: HTTP toolkits make it easy to do the wrong thing, hard to do the right thing.
• Dare Obasanjo: del.icio.us, flickr, and Bloglines use GET for edit resources.
• Sam Ruby: AJAX toolkits must beware of how they use GET.

So, to summarize, a set of related pages designed to work with the XML information in quesiton called a ClientWeb, a set of information retrieved using Web Services, and a Controller to coordinate the actions that occur between pages and to invoke suitable web services when necessary. How does all this work offline? Also to be covered in subsequent entries. Lastly let me freely admit that this is a dream in progress, open to all, and sure to be wrong in some of its details.

That was some seriously serendipitous blog spam.

So, you got your web services guy going to an outfit who knows all about storing large caches of structured data, and has demonstrated they can deliver sophisticated applications in the browser.

I guess that Bosworth’s going to help build that Web Services Browser he was talking about.

You’ll recall that he tried this by chaining the W3C’s Tidy and XSLT web services, but they didn’t provide the configuration options to force Tidy to produce output in spite of errors in HTML source, nor access to handy functions from the EXSLT library.

He’s working on another example using a page that will go through Tidy without requiring the force-output option.

There’s a couple ways to go here. One is to abstract away the Technorati request from the public interface — i.e. your application. So your server-side code talks to Technorati with your key via HTTP GET after getting the request from the user, and processes the result. That’s how I implemented the Google search appliance at work. The end user doesn’t talk to the Google box, we take the search request, construct a URL, talk to the Google box and render the XML the Appliance returns. You write this up as a class, so it’s easier to plug in. Mark Pilgrim’s already built a Technorati interface for Python, so you can use it in your applications.

Another would be for Dave to look for your application key in the HTTP request header. That’s easy enough to implement on either side. The major web languages all have functions or objects to allow you to add your own headers to a request. When I worked with the eBay API a couple of years ago, that’s how eBay expected to receive the key authorizing us to talk to their XML server.

I’ll have to look up if the headers in a HTTPS request are encrypted, since you’d need that in order to keep someone from sniffing for your Technorati key in headers sent in the clear. I’m pretty sure they are.

[ from the developer's Live Journal ] The reason I wrote it is that I find that iTunes organizes stuff too neatly. When I buy music on CD, I keep the newish and in-vogue CDs lying around on my desk or on top of the stereo for a while. Then when I’m deciding what to listen to, my eye will be caught by one of them and I’ll decide to play it. But nowadays, when I either get music in MP3 form (from eMusic or epitonic) or rip the CD and file it away, the only reminder of its existence is in iTunes, and I find that the new stuff vanishes away in a huge alphabetical list of everything I already have. And besides, I really like cover art and miss not having it around anymore.

Clutter looks up albums on Amazon.com, and creates a clickable image of the cover, playing an album from iTunes is transformed from scanning a list of albums to scanning a stack of cover art, something we’ve grown up with. Piles, anyone?

Note this was originally linked from the developer’s Live Journal on 10 January 2003. However, he didn’t expect to get blogged, and consequently asked (nicely) for me to delist it until an official release.

He used this to put together a quick and dirty bi-directional linking hack using JavaScript.