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.

4 comments:

JasonO said...

Thank you for pointing out this tool I will have to look in to how it can help me.

Santhosh said...

Yahoo Pipes is an impressive tool indeed. Nice find. Should have known earlier.

About time, I came out of the Google haze and seek cool stuff else where.

Somayaji Ravi said...

Coool, and interesting! good to know.

Sravan said...

Cool, good use of technology for everyday use. Wish you had written it before I bought my car ;)