On openkapow you can either create your own robots or use other people’s robots. You can also download other people’s robots to see how they work, and build your own robots based on others creations. This article describes the basics of how to do this.
Publish your own robots
When you have downloaded RoboMaker and created your robot it is time to publish it to openkapow. This is done from inside RoboMaker (choose “Publish” from the “File” menu). Before publishing you need to categorize the robot, write a small description and tag it so that other users can find it as well. Then you simply click the “Publish” button and your robot is uploaded to openkapow. A unique URL will be created for the robot. This URL can be used to execute the robot from your own programs or mashups.
Find and use robots
In the robot section you will find all the robots made by openkapow users. They are all categorized and tagged so that you can find robots either in the category that you are interested in, or by searching or by the tag cloud. Once you have located a robot you are interested in you click the “Try it” button for that robot. If the robot requires input parameters you will get to a page where you can configure those before executing the robot. If the robot does not require input parameters it will be executed straight away. Each robot has an unique URL that you can use to call it from other programs (for example your RSS Reader or one of your mashups).
Edit other user's robots
If you find another users robot you like, but you want to change some detail, or maybe you just want to see how it works, then just click “Edit” to download it to your computer. Then open it in RoboMaker just as you would with one of your own robots. Now you can edit it and test it out best you want. Once you are done doing the improvements and changes you wanted you can publish your own version of the robot from within RoboMaker.
Use robots in mashups
A mashup is a website or web application that combines content and functionality from more than one source. The combination of content and functionality from several sources creates new value by letting users see combinations and data that were not directly clear from the original sources alone. A classical example is to display housing ads from Craigslist.org on a Google Map. Mashups can be built in different mashup builder tools, for example Coghead and Teqlo, or using programming languages.
One of the basic problems in developing mashups is to get access to the data sources one wants to use. If they do not offer a public API the developer is limited to write complicated scripts (in Perl for example) to access the data, and then still only the most basic data can be accessed. Using openkapow robots this problem is solved quickly and easily and it opens the whole internet to mashup developers. The most common robot type to use in mashups is REST robots. Simply build a REST robot to the site you want to access, publish the robot on openkapow and then call the REST service from within a mashup builder tool or your own code (written in PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java or whatever your language of choice is). Since REST robots can output data in several formats (for example JSON, XML and CSV) it is easy to use the data from the robots in any program.
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