To help people get going with the API competition announced today on the O’Reilly Radar site, Emanuel Carnevale has written a cool extension for Google’s Chrome browser. The extension shows some of the non-O’Reilly tags on the book objects and also lets you indicate which O’Reilly books you own. It does this by putting tags onto the objects representing O’Reilly books in Fluidinfo.
To install the extension onto your Chrome browser click on the following link (from within Chrome): https://fluiddb.fluidinfo.com/about/oreilly.com/fluidinfo/chrome-extension.crx. Your browser will guide you through what to do. It’s pretty obvious stuff. Once it’s installed you’ll see a new icon in the top right hand corner of the browser window between the address bar and the little spanner icon:
Click the icon and sign in with your Fluidinfo credentials. If you don’t yet have an account on Fluidinfo you can sign up here.
How do you use it..?
Simple. Go visit the O’Reilly catalog and click on one of the books you own. For example, I happen to be the proud owner of Natural Language Processing with Python. If you visit the page for the book you’ll notice a new small Fluidinfo icon in the book details:
Click the icon and you’ll see a pop-up like this:
You can click on the appropriate statement at bottom to indicate ownership or not, as the case may be.
The writable API gives us all a voice
The extension uses an “owns” tag in your top-level Fluidinfo namespace to indicate book ownership on the objects in Fluidinfo. For example, my tag is called “ntoll/owns”. The extension attaches this tag to the object representing the O’Reilly book whose page you are visiting.
Because the extension tags the exact same Fluidinfo objects that have the O’Reilly information, I can start to do some really cool searches. For example, I happen to know Terry has a particularly large O’Reilly “zoo” as do I (in fact, doesn’t every developer..?). We can see what books we both own about Python with the following query:
oreilly.com/title matches "Python" and has terrycojones/owns and has ntoll/owns
The following code snippet for running this query uses the fluidinfo.py client library from within the Python shell. Alternatively, you can see the result directly if you visit this URL.
>>> import fluidinfo
>>> import pprint
>>> headers, result = fluidinfo.call('GET', '/values', tags=['oreilly.com/title',], query='oreilly.com/title matches "Python" and has terrycojones/owns and has ntoll/owns')
>>> pprint.pprint(result)
{u'results': {u'id': {
u'01371c03-9097-4267-a137-ae88a23790ef': {u'oreilly.com/title': {u'value': u'Python Pocket Reference, Fourth Edition'}},
u'4e9c42b6-68cb-43f5-9b75-60af9c0bd5a7': {u'oreilly.com/title': {u'value': u'Programming Python, Fourth Edition'}},
u'cd0838db-96ae-42ae-98c9-248a1507e2bb': {u'oreilly.com/title': {u'value': u'Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition'}}}}}
This illustrates how anyone can add tags to the objects being used by O’Reilly, and can then search based on their own additions and those of others. That’s why we say that Fluidinfo provides writable APIs. Cool 🙂
Run with it!
There’s obviously a lot more that could be done with this extension. We kept it simple mainly because we wanted to give an example of how such an extension could be written. We hope it can provide a basis for your own efforts, especially if you’re entering the O’Reilly API competition. Emanuel has released the source code for the extension so you can grab it from Github and take it from there!