Saturday, January 12, 2008

Yahoo Pipes

I had heard about Yahoo Pipes long time back (If my memory doesn't fail me, it should be more than six months). Little did I realize that it would be a very handy tool for me then. I have been searching for a used car for a long time and checking craigslist has sort of become a daily habit for me. It was becoming very painful visiting the site and finding out the cars that interest me. I was thinking of writing some Java Program which would filter out the things for me and send me an email of only the cars that I am looking for. Only a few days back I realized that I could use a Yahoo Pipe for the same. So I wrote a Yahoo Pipe. (Of course there were many similar pipes that people had already written, but they wouldn't meet my specific requirement and also to satisfy my ego, I thought it would be good to write one myself.) It was so easy and fast to write and the Pipe creation Tool was very impressive and I loved it. And we have an option of using the Yahoo alerts to get notifications about any changes in the Pipe Results. This was what I was exactly looking for. Had I written a Java Program it would have taken me more time and it wasn't worth the effort...until my search for cars doesn't end. Check it out http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/. You can copy others pipes and customize them, embed Pipes within Pipes. I guess these are the next-generation SOA apps or what is the term "Mashups". I am really impressed with these concepts. Trivia: As anybody can guess it derives it's name from Unix Pipes.