I think I was almost more interested in seeing the interview from this perspective than actually doing the interview. Scott Laningham is really a great interviewer; he's great at putting people at ease, and I learned a heck of a lot from the experience.
And I've never been compared to Buckaroo Banzai before, which was funny. But is it pathetic that I wound up actually referencing my own blog?
]]>This was a fun experience last year, so if you're going to the converence, stop by and say "hi"! Or let me know and maybe we can get together.
]]>If you already have a key, you can continue to use the API, but for how long? And since you can't give out your key, and they're not giving out any new ones, it means that only you can use your application. Unless it's on a web site, of course.
But those web sites seem to be the only place that Google has considered. The replacement is their AJAX API, which is, quite frankly, useless for anything but displaying results in the browser. Although it would be a straightforward technical process to extract the data from this API and use it in the same way that you used the SOAP data, it is not just explicitly forbidden in the terms of use, is referred to in the FAQ as something that will specifically get your application banned.
My mind is reeling with what this is going to do to the Web services ecosystem. Sure, most Web services applications don't use it, but I would venture to say that most of us programming the stuff started out learning on the Google API. Were we supposed to do now, switch over to the Microsoft Live API? Or is this supposed to be a way of promoting REST?
Yahoo has a REST-based API that is still functioning, presumably for the long term, but who the heck knows at this point?
To be fair, Google has always said that the service was "beta", and it has never really been officially supported, and that it might be discontinued at any time. But, come on, they certainly can't have failed to notice its popularity.
I have seen several theories on this. One mentions that many of the applications built on this technology have been Search Engine Optimization applications, many of which are commercial applications and people have been making money. One mentions the fact that by forcing people to use the Ajax API, they will be able to shoehorn in both ads and paid results. Both of these are probably true.
But these are not the only uses for which this API was suited. The inability to get at the actual data using the Ajax API means that Google data can no longer be included in mashups. (Yes, I understand that if you already have an application, you can continue to use it. I'm talking about new applications going forward.) The API can no longer be used to research information. You can no longer use it for trending. You can no longer use it for data mining.
I make my living telling people how to do things. I'm good at it. Very good at it. But I spent a lot of my time thinking about uses for these technologies so I can explain why it's important for people to learn them. For Google to pull the rug out like this makes me physically ill.
I feel like entire avenues of progress have been cut off by the loss of this capability. Will other search providers follow Google's lead and lock up their data? After all, if darling Google can do it, why can't everybody else?
You may think that I'm overreacting here, and maybe I am, but you don't see what I see. And now, apparently, nobody else will either.
]]>This incredible video called "Web 2.0... the Machine is Us/ing Us," is deeply moving and incredibly smart. The creator is Michael Wesch, an assistant Cultural Anthropology Prof at Kansas State U, and he has strung together a bunch of animations, text, and screenshots in order to tell the story of "Web 2.0" -- and why it matters, and how it's changing the world. This is as starry-eyed as techno-optimism gets, and it might just choke you up a little, if you care about this stuff.
So here it is...
The need to transform XML is so common that Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) is considered one of the basic XML specifications. This tutorial explains how to create XSLT stylesheets. It also covers the basics of XPath, which enables you to select specific parts of an XML document. Finally, it gives you a look at some of the more advanced capabilities that XSLT offers.
This tutorial is for developers who want to use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to transform the XML data into other forms without the need for to program in Java™ or other languages.
Objectives
* The basics of XSLT
* Using simple templates
* Propagating data
* Controlling spaces
* The basics of XPath
* XPath functions
* Looping and conditional statements
* Extending XSLT
* XSLT variables
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