Skype API

I just discovered the Skype API. I know, Skype is not open-source, but hey ...

The API is quite cool. Apart from the pretty obvious API access to the voice call and chat stuff, there's an API for transparently sending raw streams between programs. So, one could use the Skype API to use a pretty nifty transparent channel to send data between applications. They call this the Application2Application Protocol.

This could be the last building block I need for a pet project I have, the Personal Information Server. There I need a method to communicate with different PIS in a P2P manner, no DNS name resolution and stuff. Transparent "just works" type of communication.

Using the PIS one would mark certain types of information managed by the PIS as "public", and other PIS (those from your friends, co-workers, company , ...) would

query any "new" stuff and incorporate this new stuff into their own information store.

Using the Skype API, this could work out pretty nifty:

• You start up your PIS instance
• the PIS instance checks whether or not you're online with Skype
• if you're online:
• check if my buddies are online and have their PIS started
• fetch the new stuff (contact info's, phone numbers, events, blogs, ...)

So, in theory, if you start up your PIS, it begins to sync with your peer PIS from your friends. That way, contacts and events stay synchronized, even if you're not online all the time, and even if you're behind a firewall.

You could also have more than one PIS, one on the road on your laptop, one at home, etc.

Nifty.

I think I'll play around with this stuff a bit. I've found no python bindings yet, but hey, at last we all have ctypes now with python 2.5, don't we ;)

Google's GData API

I'm currently investigating the use of the GData API when it comes to create a command line blog posting tool written in pure python.

Well, it seems that there's no Python API for the pure Google Data stuff yet (I know about the Google Base Data API).

But from what I've understood this is all pure HTML POST and GET using an extended version of the ATOM XML schema. Using urllib and ElementTree in python its just plain simple to actually get your blog feeds. They've even built in some sort of query language.

Unfortunately, to authenticate with Google using your Google account, there's a bit more involved. The Java guys have it better here: There's a nice high-level API. Doh.

Authentication is, as far as I understood, needed to post blog entries.

Note to myself:

• Investigate Google Authentication wrt. Plone PAS
• provide a pure python script which posts to a blog
• hook script into a plone work flow to publish atricles from plone to blogs. Create a new content type for that, track blog post IDs we got back from google inside plone. Use Five and notifiers to update blog if Plone document changes. This would be a PIS module.