How to get started
Getting started with creating your own robots is very easy. In order to create robots you need to download the development environment RoboMaker and install it locally on your computer. With point-and-click you then create your robots in RoboMaker, there is no need to do any programming of any sort. Once you are done with creating your robot you publish it on openkapow.com from inside RoboMaker. Then you can run your robots from openkapow’s servers and you can share your robot with the rest of the community. Each published robot gets an unique URL that you can use to call the robot from within Yahoo! Pipes, your RSS Reader of choice, from your site, from your program or from your mashup.
What is an openkapow robot?
A robot in openkapow is a small program that automates what a person can do in a browser. Do you want to go and read news on a site, log in to a site and check your private messages or maybe check the latest results for your stocks or favorite team? Make that automatic in a few minutes and then use the robots from within your news feed reader or your own programs.
RoboMaker
RoboMaker is the visual development environment used to create robots. In RoboMaker a robot is created by putting together steps and configuring those steps. This is done using a point-and-click interface that includes a browser view that allows the developer to see the page the robot interacts within the same way as if it was in a normal browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. RoboMaker is a client program that is downloaded and run on the developer’s local machine. When a robot is complete it can be published to openkapow.com from within RoboMaker.
Cool things with RoboMakerIt gives you the power to do what you need to do:
- Full control over the process flow, including conditions and loops. Handle if-scenarios, or-scenarios & and-scenarios without problems.
- Flexible error handling. Use the built-in debugger to test your robots.
- HTTP, HTTPs, cookies, logins, headers, Javascript etc is all handled and completely under your control.
- Access web pages through a browser view, DOM view, HTML source view or using the HTML tag path.
- The robot executes while you are developing it! That gives you full control over the current state of the robot.
Tips: Download RoboMaker now and check it out for yourself Different types of Robots
There are 3 different types of openkapow robots that you can create:
- RSS/Atom feed robots
An RSS robot is a robot that creates an RSS feed or an Atom feed. The RSS feed can then be read using a special RSS Reader, a browser that supports RSS or a mail program that can read RSS. An RSS robot is run on a schedule defined by the robot developer. For example it can be run once an hour, which means that once an hour the feed will be updated with the new information the robot might have found.
Read more: - REST robots
A REST robot is a robot that is run as a REST service, this is a web service that is available from a normal URL. The robot then outputs the result of its work in for example XML, HTML or JSON. REST robots are normally used to create an API-like interaction with a web site and the REST robots are usually called from within a program (written in for example PHP, Ruby on Rails, C# or Java). This makes REST robots the perfect base for mashups!
Read more:
- Web Clip robots
With Web Clip robots it is possible take one piece of functionality from one web site and display it on another. Using a Web Clip robot it is possible to take a complete site, a part of a site, or just a part of a page and use it outside the original site. Inside the robot it is possible to change the HTML, the stylesheets etc of the original site.
Read more: