Re: xAP Weather and xAP News Beta released

[Stuart Booth]

Hi James,

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 21:37:28 -0000, "jamestraynor" <<a
href="/group/xap_automation/post?postID=go_2o_jPJ_6Fo6Vg8DPnvhYpgwiabapd6hGmyLeYweoS2yoYFimI0_1sCdDduibZ55zf">james@m...</a>>
wrote:

>I have released two xAP programs on my website www.mi4.biz, schema
>for them both is there aswell. They are both beta (windows 95+) but
>have been running at home for a while without problems so....

>xAP News is a similar idea, but , yes , for news. It collects RSS/RDF
>data and re broadcasts it as xAP. It currently xAPs the first 5
>stories with full title/link/description info (if available).

Just been giving xAP News a go. This is a wonderful idea that I want
some OSD output from (but we'll come to that separately as you know).

I was looking at your schema for this app and I was wondering about a
couple of things. These are just thoughts out loud.

In the News.Report class, how about fragmenting it a bit more? For
instance:

Class = News.Report

News.Feed
{
Name=(name of the station - 8 chars max)
-- Mandatory
Title=(Full name of the news feed)
-- mandatory
Link=(http address of news site, not the rdf feed but the site)
-- optional
Desc=(Description of the news feed)
-- optional
Error=(Download errors either "NoData" if last connection failed
or
"StationNotFound" if feed isn't valid)
-- optional
}

And then, similar to News.Alert:

News.Story
{
Stitle=(Title of story)
-- mandatory
Slink=(Link of story)
-- optional
Sdesc=(Description of story)
-- optional
}

You could then have multiple News.Story blocks in a single xAP message
for each story in the report. This avoids decoding StitleX, SlinkX etc
to pair them up - all details of one story are in a single block - and
keeps the news feed site data distinct from the actual stories, of
which there may be any number.

It also removes any limit (of say 'up to 5 stories') on the number of
stories, albeit at the risk of making the xAP message rather large.
Still, they could be sent as completely separate messages rather than
multiple message blocks.

I also removed the name of the station from the name of the block and
added it as a message block value. This struck me as being the place
for it, since it's a variable data value rather than a type name, but
others may differ!

To save a wee tad of space the 'S' prefix in the News.Story block
could be dropped too I suppose. I keep thinking of really low-end
serial devices here, but I'm miles away from fiddling with the likes
of this yet.

>news uses rdf or rss .091,1.0,2.0 formats,

Do you happen to know of a handy reference site to find out more about
this format? It's on my ToDo list (not that I really need to add to
this of course) to look into.

HTH

Stuart
--
Stuart Booth
xAPFramework.net - a reusable xAP framework for .net

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