What are the essential tools that every IT person should have in the modern IT world? That is the idea behind a new Kingston University module called IT Toolbox. Over a 12 week semester, first year students will be guided through a series of activities such as blogging, running a server, client and server side scripting, search, social networking and problem solving. Each of those activities will be published here and anyone is welcome to join in.

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Mashups (Toolbox lecture 9)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

December 1, 2009 [2198 views]

Video from Jonathan Briggs on Vimeo.

In today's lecture we'll look at Mashups: tools, data and services that you can build on to create software systems, prototypes and experiments.

We'll be using a tool called Pipes from Yahoo! and this builds upon the RSS activity that you had last week.

Steps in creating a mashup

  1. Find your data online
  2. You may need to scrape that data from the web or it may be available in the form you need
  3. Look to see whether the sites you use have "data interfaces" or APIs such as RSS
  4. Find tools that allow you to manipulate the data into the format you need
  5. Explore how the resulting data or visualisation can be integrated back into your work, blog, mobile app or software

Here are a list of tools and sites that you might want to explore.

http://pipes.yahoo.com
http://www.dapper.net/

http://mashable.com/
http://www.programmableweb.com/

Recent comments:

On December 2, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Adomas Svirskas wrote:

A good lecture, Jonathan! I enjoyed it.

Reminds me that rainy day in March at the Altec office in Brussels, PANDA review preparation & playing with the pipes :) And the lecture in Vilnius, of course.

Jonathan replies: Thanks Adomas - hope you are enjoying your travels!

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