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Web Service Dapper Aggregates All Types of Content

 


"It's like Lego."

JavaScriptSearch
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; 05:38 AM

Dapper, not to be mistaken with the latest Ubuntu OS, is a new web service that can aggregate all types of internet content.  The project website is available at www.dapper.com, although the service itself will launch shortly (in August, anyway).


Dapper may prove to be a useful tool for creating mashups -- small web applications that combine data from several online sources.  Dapper allows you to build an API for any website. It will allow remarkable flexibility: if a data source is not "mashup-ready" in its current form, the Dapper service will take you through a user-friendly graphical interface tour that will result in the data being "dapped," or converted into a usable format like XML, HTML, RSS, Google Map, etc. Programmers can use dapped content in raw XML form, or use an SDK. The layman can use the tools, provided by Dapper.

The first working Dapper project is Magg -- an aggregator for video content that uses AJAX to display videos from virtually all major online video providers. According to its developers, Magg was built in just one day using Dapper. It uses Dapper to get the latest videos from a wide range of Internet video clip sites (Google Videos, Yahoo Videos, YouTube, MetaCafe, Veoh, Vimeo, and more), as well as to obtain search results for specific queries from these sites.

The developers noted that "The vast majority of these sites do not provide an API or RSS, so the example is particularly relevant - without Dapper, this would have been a much harder task...To create the service, we just Dapped each website (the newest videos pages and for the search results pages) and then wrote a bit of Javascript and DHTML to compose all the results together in a nice looking page."

 

 Magg.com: a demo of Dapper's capabilities.

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