Interoperability and Service Cascading
Tuesday, January 24th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
One of the great things about industry standards is interoperability. For BPM, having a process designer based on BPMN allows us to import process models from other tools such as IDS-Scheer ARIS, while adopting BPEL for process execution gives our customers the ability to deploy their processes on our process server as well as IBM’s or Oracle’s. The same is true with Office 2.0, and here is an example of service interoperability in action.
The problem I was trying to solve was the following: how could I display on my webblog a list of bookmarks managed by Simpy without having to write any PHP code? The problem was easily solved when I was using del.icio.us, which offers a service called Linkrolls. All you have to do is specify the tag for which you want a list of bookmarks to be displayed and Linkrolls gives you a snipet of JavaScript code that you just copy and paste into the HTML code of your weblog. Unfortunately, Simpy does not support this feature yet, so I had to look further.
I got the answer from Jonathan Aquino, the guy who wrote the excellent YubNub, which is best described as a command line for the web and which I have included into my Office 2.0 setup. Jonathan pointed me to Peter Cooper’s FeedDigest, which is one of the most advanced feed processing services currently available. Here is how it works: first, I built a list of bookmarks using Simpy. Second, I copied the URL for the corresponding RSS feed into FeedDigest. Third, I configured the digest in FeedDiggest to order items by title, show only live items, and specify the appropriate HTML template using <ul> and <li> tags. Fourth, I got FeedDigest to generate a snipet of JavaScript code that I copied into my WordPress template. Voila! The following list of Top Office 2.0 Posts was generated that way:
To summarize, three services have been cascaded with each other in order to achieve this result: Simpy for generating the RSS feed of bookmarks, FeedDigest for processing the feed and generating the Javascript code to be used, and WordPress for displaying the information. The standardization of JavaScript and RSS is what makes this interoperability possible, and even though this example is rather trivial, it demonstrates that multiple services can be used in combination in order to achieve results that a single service cannot offer.
Last comment on FeedDigest: because FeedDigest actually processes the RSS feed, it allows me to do things that del.icio.us’ Linkrolls could not, such as reordering feed items or aggregating multiple feeds together. The downside is that it creates a single point of failure between the feed’s producer (Simpy) and the feed consumer (WordPress), but the value it adds to the chain seems to be worth it. I will meet with Peter Cooper later next month and suggest a couple of enhancements to his service. If you have some creative ideas yourself, feel free to send them my way.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0, Standardization
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We’re adding some interesting new features to reduce that point of failure. We’ve seen with FeedBurner and other services that people don’t really like single points of failure, and we’ve figured out a great way around it. More details to come… :)
[…] Beyond peer-to-peer collaboration, syndication opens the door to social cooperation. This really is the essence of Web 2.0, and Office 2.0 should benefit from it as much as possible. Syndication also provides the mechanisms that are required for integrating multiple services with each other, as described in this recent article. As a result, services that offer RSS feeds and REST APIs always get my vote over ones that do not. Hint to LinkedIn: this is where I believe the most significant improvements could be made to your exceptional service. […]
[…] Most blog authors like to syndicate the content of other blogs, or display some information that is published through public feeds, such as bookmarks, calendar events, or pictures. When you need to process such feeds for creating digests, re-ordering entries, or generating a snipet of JavaScript code that will display on your blog the content you’re getting from others, a service such as FeedDigest becomes very useful. It can also be used for cascading multiple services without having to write any code. A free account lets you produce five digest, but it will cost you $49.99 a year if you need up to 50. […]
[…] Most social bookmarking tools have the same problem: they cannot sustain the growth of their user base and have to work in batch mode. What this means is that if you update your bookmarks stored in del.ico.us, changes might be reflected only 24 hours later. Similar problems plague Simpy and FeedDigest, which makes service cascading less reliable than it could be. Nevertheless, both services are currently being improved and I would expect these problems to be resolved no later than in the second half of 2006. […]
[…] This little experiement taught me a couple of things: First, service cascading works, and we should thank standards such as RSS for it. Second, using a third-party service to fetch hundreds of feed and aggregate thousands of entries while caching the results for you is not a bad idea, especially if you’re running your blog from a single server. Third, Yahoo! Pipes works, but its capabilities are fairly limited so far, and sorting does not work at all, which is a shame really. I very much look forward to the next revision, which hopefully will let me connect from Dabble DB directly in order to automatically import the list of feeds that I want to aggregate. In the meantime, have fun with this stream of unfiltered Office 2.0 News. […]
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