Thinking by Analogy

By Jon Udell

March 18, 2002

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In a column last month on general-purpose scripting I identified two major axes: language and environment. Freedom to innovate in the language domain is a wonderful thing, but scripting languages pay for that freedom by recreating complete environments in which to operate.

Lately, while adding a new arrow to my scripting quiver — Frontier's UserTalk — I've had a chance to observe first-hand the process of mapping knowledge from one environment to another. For my weblog, I developed a feature I'm calling a channelroll. It's like the blogrolls that decorate so many weblogs but one step more abstract. In addition to the URL of each site that mentions it, it offers a link to the site's RSS channel, and another link (currently useful only to users of Radio UserLand) that invokes the one-click-subscribe feature in Radio.

I wrote the script as a web service. A variation of the ones I wrote about last time, it returns a string of formatted HTML rather than structured data. Why a web service? It's gratuitous in this context, I must admit, as Sam Ruby noticed when he decided to implement the widget as a simple macro, rather than an XML-RPC/SOAP end point. What I envision, for later, is automated social network analysis based on this information, but in that case a structured-data flavor of the widget would make the most sense.

In any event, the script's major task is the same: Extract data from a table in Frontier's object database, sort it, and emit HTML. Given a Perl hash table or a Python dictionary, I'd have made quick work of the job. Doing just that was, in fact, an option. I could imagine creating another web service that would export the data from Radio to Perl or Python, where it could be munged in a friendly and familiar environment, and then returned as a string to Radio.

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