QueryPath News

Apr 28 2009

This week is "QueryPath week".

IBM developerWorks has published Get to know the QueryPath PHP library: A fast, easy way to work with XML and HTML. The article walks discusses the design of the QueryPath library, and walks through a simple Twitter search application.
The folks at OpenAmplify have started tweeting about my screencast using QueryPath with OpenAmplify. I was gonna save the screencast for CMS Expo, but here it is. (If you are coming to CMS Expo, I might let you play with it.)

This short screencast presents a quick module I put together that uses QueryPath to retrieve and process web service information. The cornerstone of the application is the OpenAmplify web service, which provides lexical analysis of a text, returning information that can be used, well, to build stuff like this. <!--break--> The astute watcher may notice some of the other QueryPath items that were not demonstrated in the screencast: seeded SPARQL, DBPedia integration, and MusicBrainz searches.

I should note that that demo was made with Acquia Drupal with only the default modules enabled. All of the web service interaction -- from Amazon to Technorati to Flickr to Twitter -- was handled by QueryPath. Oh, and the SVG files were generated by QueryPath, too. Why not use the existing modules? There is simply no need. It is faster to write a few lines of QueryPath than it is to do any integration work with existing modules.

OpenAmplify has suggested tidying up the module and releasing it. If there is enough interest, I may do that. It could easily be broken up into two or more modules, with a core amplifier and various add-ons.