An 8-Minute Yahoo! Meta-Search App With Video Demo | January 31, 2007
by Byron Binkley
Here's the demo. Here's the story behind it:
Up at Mashup Camp 3 during the speed-geeking competition, I was demoing Proto’s “group/ungroup” functionality for one of the QEDwiki guys when I heard from over my shoulder, “Cute.”
A year and a half ago I would have trembled in my sneakers. But today when I hear “cute” from a programmer wearing a VPLs-are-lame, pocket-aces grin across his face, I get excited.
“Cute?” I inquired. And he asked what a lot of passer-bys think, but tactfully avoid saying, “It’s cute, but what can it really do.”
I was up against two significant perceptual hurdles: 1) Proto is a visual, flow based programming language, and no self-respecting programmer believes “everyone will program” (handled nicely by Jeb recently) and 2) Proto runs on Windows only. Not that cool in the “everything must be in the browser” world we live in. Slow playing the power of Proto seemed like a bad idea, so I came out swinging.
“Proto has the VBA IDE built in. Grab this module, slap it on the Builder, and drop into writing code if you need to.”
Even VBA could ordinarily leave you open for attacks in an audience of programmers. ByRef? Lame. “On Error Resume Next”? Worse. But something is changing.
There is a new force at work and it’s turning into a mashup mantra: practical, useful, monetizable, “enterprise” mashups. Business mashups. Situational applications. Recombinant, componentized data and services that end users can share and work into meaningful tools to solve legitimate problems. This is the new cool. VBA is the scripting environment of choice to 3 million power users worldwide who learned it on the job to enhance their spreadsheet hacking skills. And through COM it can interact with a bazillion other desktop apps like, oh, Office. So we actually gained ground on that argument.
He stepped closer and shot out a challenge, “What if you want to make a meta-search engine? How do I take multiple sets of query results and do some analysis to re-rank them?”
Okaaaaaay. Now we’re talking. He wanted me to say that you could write a widget that would take up to three sets of search data in a particular format and then output the analysis. Most mashup building tools can link together a few data sets and services. But the mashing has to occur in a widget, and the widgets are almost always written in some coding environment. That puts you back in the coding camp, and mashup building for everyone falls back to fiction when the data can’t get combined, cleaned, or analyzed by a pre-existing end-user widget.
This is where Proto shows power. Through trying for years to build a true no-code development environment (and ultimately determining that VBA was a must have feature), we filled in many of the no-code holes that pop up on trading floors and hedge funds when building real world, analytical situational applications. These same functional benefits stand front and center when it comes to building mashups from varied data and services.
The power, as it happens, to build analytical meta-search tools on the fly when challenged. Check out this 8 minute video demonstrating how to build a meta-search based on the Yahoo! REST APIs, a couple components from our gallery and some serious mashing. This is damn close to the demo that won over the skeptic at Mashup Camp. And it’s the reason, I think, for the supportive shout out from the guys over at Dapper (who make it possible, nay easy, to create structured data for further analysis in Proto like this sweet Hard Drive Price Analysis from Pricewatch.com tool Jeb made).
Having said all this and shamelessly promoted Proto’s desktop power, I think the web-based mashup building tools are on to something too. I was extremely impressed by just how much they can do in the browser. I came away from Mashup Camp feeling more than anything that there is a need for clarification and comparative criteria. Neither approach is better. It’s not desktop or web. They’re just… different. Each facilitates different use cases. Perhaps an adjective like “desktop”, “analytic”, “enterprise”, or "consumer" will serve to split the space of mashups to help clarify how to compare mashup building tools that do more than tossing more feed data onto a Yahoo! Map.
But for now Proto is many things, not just “cute”. I mean, it is cute. Cute and deadly like a human baby with wings and/or talons.
