Made-To-Order Content With Yahoo Pipes

Made-to-order content with Yahoo Pipes

Combine and rework content feeds to suit your taste

Skill Level: IntroductoryJeff K. Wilson(wilsonje@us.ibm.com) e-business architectIBM05 Jun 2007Explore the steps and benefits of using a content feed filtering utility like Yahoo Pipesto better capture, merge, and alter specific data from available streams. This tutorialoutlines some techniques to approach feed transformations, and includes threedemonstrations featuring key areas of the environment.

Section 1. Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial provides a basic understanding of Yahoo Pipes, a service that filters,transforms, and aggregates content feeds. A complete run-through of the toolsetavailable is included, as are three demonstrations that illustrate the capabilities andfeatures of the service. Finally, step-by-step instructions for one of thedemonstrations complete the tutorial, along with arecorded movie showing the stepsin detail.

Objectives

The intent of this tutorial is simply to describe the Yahoo Pipes service for managingavailable content feeds, focusing on the features, tools, and capabilities available.

Prerequisites and system requirements

No prerequisites are necessary for this tutorial. All functionality is available online.

Section 2. Introduction

Recently, I've had the opportunity to become immersed in various Web 2.0technologies, investigating the effect they might have on application development.The concept of Web 2.0 means different things to different people, but one tenet thatstands out is its impact on social computing, which takes many forms. What'sinteresting is that, as the population becomes more comfortable with onlineinteractions, you all become less reliant on user interfaces (UI) that give you thespecific information you happen to be looking for and more comfortable simplyasking for just the information itself—allowing you to display or use it however youwant.Enter

content feeds

stage right: information without an interface.This effect of these feeds on not only developers but also users is clear.

Portals,

orgateways to information, are more and more prevalent, and are frequentlyimplemented as personal homepages where users are given the tools to displayinformation. These tools allow the user to decide what data to display on the page.For developers, the impact is on various tools that allow them to expose or use datain standardized, generic ways that, well,

feed

into these new flexible UIenvironments.Most significantly, developers can now be set free from the limitations that forcedthem to be both highly skilled technicians and subject matter experts. Traditionally, alone programmer might require knowledge of interface technologies and also needto personally maintain the information that would be used in the application he orshe was building. Today, with structured data widely available, should I decide on awhim to build the next great personals community, virtual car dealership, orcomputer reseller site, I can do so from my kitchen table.

About Yahoo Pipes

Now, I have one small problem: if my newJeffsWayCoolEventCoordinatorPortal.com site relies on someone else's streamingdata, how do I strip what I want from what they deliver? Certainly, streams abound,and I frequently can do some limited filtering with them, but rarely—if ever—can Imanipulate the data as I typically can on a local data source.For example, what if I want to get a feed of particular products, but only in aparticular color? Or if I need the items sorted in a specific way? Or if, heaven forbid, Ineed to merge data from multiple sources?Enter Yahoo Pipes stage left: no information, no interface, but the tools necessary totweak what goes between the two.Yahoo Pipes is a particularly interesting utility that sits between an application and asource of data. This service allows developers to transform, fine-tune, and otherwiseexperiment with content before pulling it into an application.It is a simple but powerful mechanism that saves developers much work when theybuild an internal parsing and editing engine within their applications.I recorded the steps outlined in this tutorial in a Flash movie; you can find it inConclusion. You might want to check it out if you can't spend the time implementingyour own pipes.

Section 3. Yahoo Pipes: A tour of the facilities

Slick and exciting

To begin with, let me show you around the tooling.To be perfectly honest, the developers of this environment really did an interesting job pulling together an altogether user-friendly and appealing interface.The ultimate concept is to pull content into the tool, pass it through a series of stepsthat perform some kind of work on it, and finally output a new stream. This processcertainly lends itself to a visually oriented tool like this, one that lays out the steps ina flow diagram. The ability to easily drag and drop components, set attributes usingforms embedded in these components, and draw connections from the outputs ofone to the input of another is extremely powerful in its simplicity.

Category:	Uncategorized.
Rating:	(3 Ratings)
Upload Date:	06/13/2007
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	Technology yahoo rss pipes Technology-Web-20 Technology yahoo rss pipes Technology-Web-20 (fewer)

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