Infrequently Noted

As many a Dojo user is aware, we've been supporting Yahoo's forward-thinking JSON-P style endpoints for their various web services for a long time. We even have a nice RPC wrapper and simple description format for most of them. And no, you don't have to download YUI to get at this stuff...it's all pure Dojo. We make it easier to work with Yahoo's services than Yahoo does.

And that now includes Yahoo Pipes. It's cool and interesting to be able to call out to Pipes from your server-side web-app, but what the mashup-mad word REALLY needs is to be able to do the same thing from a browser. Despite not really being in the docs anywhere, Yahoo's Kent Brewster points out that Pipes supports a JSON-P callback argument. Awesome!

The structure of Pipes URLs are different than every other Yahoo service (much like flickr. ugg.), so there's no Dojo RPC for it yet, but you can easily query a pipe using dojo.io.bind and the ScriptSrcIO transport:

// get news results for Cometd
dojo.require("dojo.io.ScriptSrcIO"); // the x-domain magic
dojo.require("dojo.debug.console"); // firebug integration
dojo.io.bind({
// grab this URL from the pipe you're interested in
url: "http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/fELaGmGz2xGtBTC3qe5lkA/run",
mimetype: "text/json",
transport: "ScriptSrcTransport",
jsonParamName: "_callback", // aha!
content: {
"_render": "json",
"textinput1": "cometd"
},
load: function(type, data, evt){
// log the response out to the Firebug console
dojo.require("dojo.json");
dojo.debug(dojo.json.serialize(arguments));
}
});

Pipes is a bit slow right now, so you might not want to use this for main page content, but it's a great way to decorate pages, blogs, and other kinds of data with a lot more context from all over the web.

One of my goals for 2007 is to spend less time on the road, and SitePen has been helping to make sure that I get real blocks of time for R&D. This is all the more important given the aggressive Dojo 1.0 roadmap. As a result, I'm skipping some of my favorite conferences (SxSW, ETech, etc.) and doing less speaking in general. But that doesn't mean I'm not traveling at all, just that we're trying to "make it count".

Here's an abbreviated version of my conference schedule until about June:

• ISOC-IL 2007 Conference: after a full day of listening to me yammer, hopefully there will still be some interest in using Dojo somewhere in Israel.
• ETel: the telco guys don't know me, but if they show up at ETel the sure won't like me when it's all said and done. This talk will be something of a reprise of my no-holds-bared EuroOSCON talk. Swearing will most certainly be involved.
• AjaxWorld NY: not speaking (Dylan is!) but as I'm on the board of the Open Ajax Alliance, I'll be in NY for the members meeting at the very least.
• Web 2.0 Expo: thanks to Simon I'll be on an Ajax Toolkits panel. A good time will be had by all while we dodge the "why shouldn't I use Flash/Flex?" question.
• Java One: Jean Francois, Greg Wilkins, and I will prognosticate about the state of Comet in Java. Thanks to the hard work of both of those chaps, the future is surprisingly bright.
• 2007 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: I'll be attending this one, and thankfully it's in Oakland. Lots to talk about regarding security on the web these days and this is the place to do it.

Believe it or not, that's a relaxed schedule from last year. If you're going to be heading to any of these and want to catch beer, don't hesitate to drop me a line.