Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Twitter Radio

Thought I'd try to get my XQuery Twitter Radio application going to listen to the tweets from the Mark Logic conference. It's only a simple script, requires Opera with Voice enabled and uses http-equiv="refresh" to refresh the page. It only works if the window is active, so it rather limits my use of the computer - just need another to run the radio I guess. If I wasn't marking, I'd write an AJAX-based version. XHTML+Voice is quite tricky to get right however.

Twitter Radio on #mluc09

I rather like the idea of following the Mark Logic conference with an eXist-based mashup - perhaps we should organise an eXist conference in Bristol - with my part-time status next academic year, perhaps I should put some effort into an event in Bristol.

2 comments:

Jason Monberg said...

Chris, next year you should come to the Mark Logic conference and demonstrate how to make a Twitter Radio using XQuery!

Our conference is focused on Mark Logic of course, but we did several community driven/focused events this year. Even if written on eXist this could be a great demonstration of building a fun XQuery based application.

chris wallace said...

Jason, thanks for the encouragement. I've now posted the code, warts and all, to the XQuery Wikibook - http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XQuery/XHTML_%2B_Voice

The eXist-specific parts are the request module to access HTTP parameters and the parse function to convert text to XML. Hopefully with the efforts of EXQuery and EXPath to standardise these basic functions, such scripts should be portable between platforms.