I am considering using EWS Java API to access Exchange. Specifically, to insert appointment into users' calendars. Now, the online documentation that I immediately find is... sparse, so I would very much appreciate if someone could give some input in:
1. Is this an API worth using?
2. Are there any online resources for it (that a rather superficial google doesn't find)?
3. Is there anyone of the alternatives I should use instead? (SyncEx, j-exchange)
I've seen previously posted links to the alternatives. What I am hoping for, however, is that someone can share experience with what is actually good to work with.
Thanks a lot,
Håkan
Related
I am thinking about building a student app, that would use Moodle data, and notify the user when a new file has been uploaded, and perhaps do something like checking your grades etc.
I'm quite new to android programming and can get easily confused with the technical terms. I've looked around the web and found that there is an API, but I dont really 100% know what that means. Which is weird since I've communicated with API's like the OpenWeatherMap one and uTorrent. Would Moodle's api do the same? Make it easier for me to get their data? Their descriptions are really technical and I can not understand much.
Please note that "API" in moodle does not automatically refer to webservices like you are used to communicate with.
See https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Mobile_web_services and https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Using_web_services and https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Web_service_API_functions
These docs might be interesting for you.
Beside the existing webservice methods, you can also create your own moodle plugin, which provides the methods required, some info can be found here https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Adding_a_web_service_to_a_plugin
This wiki page, http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Getting_started_with_Java, lists several CouchDB Java clients. I wonder if any of the clients mentioned is significantly more dominant/popular/better/supported than the others.
I think Ektorp is pretty much the clear leader at the mo. I've certainly been very happy with it, and I've never seen anybody using anything else.
In addition, as a quick metric, Ektorp is clearly far more actively maintained than any of the others: currently the last commit on Ektorp was 5 hours ago, vs 4 years for CouchDB4j, a little over 1 year for jcouchdb and 2 years for jRelax.
I tried CouchDB4j and it has only a few methods implemented. They are not so well documented and you might find the complete lack of code example implementations very frustrating as it happened to me.That is why I would not recommend it. To give you a feel about this API, I tried attaching a certain file to an already existing document from the database and it does not support this kind of process.
I will now give Ektorp a shot and will come back with an edit as I go along. Looking at the recent activity between these two it is a big difference: Ektorp has been last updated a month ago vs CouchDB4j having been updated 3 years ago at the moment when this comment was written. Hope this will help.
EDIT: Ektorp is definitely the way to go. It allows you to build your own kind of entry in the database, with as many and variate fields as you want. It also allows easy manipulation of attachments. For me, it did the trick.
Lightcouch seems to be most active nowadays. Ektorp is also still active, however.
Each has its own strengths, however, so I'd pick based on what level you want to be abstracted from CouchDB's HTTP API. Myself, I'd use Lightcouch.
Nowdays the most well supported Java Client for CouchDB should be the official one from IBM cloudant-java-sdk as it is their interest to maintain it. Here you can find it on Maven Repository.
i would like to implement some kind of service my customers can use to find their company on
a. blogs, forums
b. facebook, twitter
c. review sites
a. blogs, forums
This can only be done by a crawler, right? A crawler looking for the robots.txt on a forum/blog and than optionally reading the content (and of course links) of the forum/blog.
But where to start? Can i use a set of sites to start with crawling? do i have to predefine them or can i use some other searchengine first? E.g. searching in Google for that company and then crawl the SERPs? Legal?
b. facebook, twitter
They have APIs, so hat should not be a problem i think.
c. review sites
I looked at some review site's TOS and they wrote that using an automated software crawling their sites is not permitted. On the other hand, the sites that are relevant to me are not disallowed in their robots.txt. What matters here?
Any other hints are welcome.
Thanks in advance :-)
Honestly, the easiest way to do it would be to start with the search engines. They all have APIs for doing automated searches, so that'd probably give yout he highest return for your time on getting back links/mentions of your client's products or brand.
That won't handle things behind authentication, only public stuff (of course). But it'll give you a good baseline to start with. From there, you could (if you want) use API's or custom-written bots that are given auth creds on the sites, but honestly I think at that point you're missnig the core question, I think.
Is the core question, "Where are we mentioned?" or is the core question really... "What sites are getting traffic to come to us?" In most cases, it's the latter, in which case you can ignore all of what I said previously and just use Google Analytics, or similar software on your client's site to determine where traffic's coming from.
Edit
Ok, so if it's where are we mentioned, I'd still start w/ the search engines as stated. Google's api is pretty easy and it has a SOAP based one that you can pull in as a web reference if you want; example
Re: review sites. If the site's TOS says you can't use automated bots, then it's a good idea not to use automated bots. The robots.txt is not legally binding (it's sort of a good-neighbor thing), and so I wouldn't not use the lack of exclusion there to be permission. Some review sites (more modern ones) might disallow automated scraping of their site, but they might still publish RSS feeds or Atom feeds or have some other API that you can hook into, that's worth checking.
Am going to begin my work in article extraction.
The task that I will be doing is to extract the hotel reviews that is posted in different web pages(eg. 1. http://www.tripadvisor.ca/Hotel_Review-g32643-d1097955-Reviews-San_Mateo_County_Memorial_Park_Campground-Loma_Mar_California.html, 2. http://www.travelpod.com/hotel/Comfort_Suites_Sfo_Airport-San_Mateo.html )
I need to do the task in Java and I am just working with Java for the past couple of months alone..
And here comes my questions regarding these.
Is there possibility to extract reviews alone from different web pages in a generic way.
Kindly let me know if there are any API that supports the task in Java.
Also, let me know of your thoughts/sources which will be more helpful for me to attain the task mentioned above.
UPDATE
If any sort of related examples available in net, please post the same since that could be of great use.
You probably need a screen scraping utility for Java like TagSoup or NekoHTML. JSoup is also popular.
However, you also have a bigger legal consideration here when extracting data from a 3rd party website like tripadvisor. Does their policy allow it?
I'm writing a Java program, and I want a function that, given a string, returns the number of Google hits a search formed from that query returns. How can I do this? (Bonus points for the same answer but with Bing instead.)
For instance, googleHits("Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?") would return 131,000,000. (or however many there are.)
Related: How can I programmatically access the "did you mean" suggestion? (eg searching "teh circuz" returns "did you mean the circus?")
found it: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje
The Google Terms of Service say this:
5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services
by any means other than through the
interface that is provided by Google,
unless you have been specifically
allowed to do so in a separate
agreement with Google. You
specifically agree not to access (or
attempt to access) any of the Services
through any automated means (including
use of scripts or web crawlers) and
shall ensure that you comply with the
instructions set out in any robots.txt
file present on the Services.
Google has ways of making life unpleasant for you / your company if you violate the Terms of Service ...
UPDATE: The second sentence is about the way that you use Google's services ... including their published APIs. It is not entirely clear from the wording what is allowed and what is forbidden; literally speaking "any automated means" is very broad. However a Java app that performed Google searches, screen-scraped the results and repackaged them to provide some value added service would (IMO) be a violation of the TOS. And using Google's published APIs to do the same thing would (IMO) also be a violation.
But that's my opinion, not Google's. And it is the Google opinion that matters. If anyone is thinking of doing something like this, they should contact Google and check that what they are proposing is OK.
The point is that Google is not going to assist people to subvert their search business model. Anyone who thinks they can get away with it based on some clever interpretation of the TOS is going to get burned.
for the first part of the answer, try read the t-o-s; for the "did you mean" part, see: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
You may be able to do it "legally" using the Google Java Client Library. I don't know for sure, but they may have some methods similar to what you're looking for, and you won't be violating their TOS.
Google Data APIs Library
You can legally access the Google AJAX Feed API through its RESTful interface:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/documentation/#fonje
Bing still has a developer program where you can call against their API in a JSON/XML or SOAP matter:
http://www.bing.com/developers