Yahoo pipes… programming made ‘easy’?

Occasionally when some non-programmer sees program builders like code generating UML tools or, in this case Yahoo’s new pipes service, they start making jokes about how developers are going to unnecessary in the future.

Normally I would just forget about such nonsense, but since this one involved the incredibly hyped Yahoo service I decided to have look at it.

Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code. The DHMTL/Ajax application looks rather nice. It’s one of the first DHTML interfaces I used which really manages to feel like a real application.

After playing around with it for a short while I discovered that it is really difficult to create something useful. You have to be a programmer to actually understand how to make it work. Even worse: if you are a programmer you’d probably not use this tool since coding is MUCH easier.

Consider the ‘ebay pricewatch’ pipe at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/avkEShi32xG_EF6KZVUMqA/edit?opendesc=true

(or click at the images in this post to get an idea)

So much lines and complex configuration! It took me about 10 minutes to write this small Ruby example which does something very similar:

[ruby]
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘simple-rss’

class EbayWatcher
def search (search, lower, upper)
url = “http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=SearchResults&siteId=0&language=en-US&output=RSS20&from=R8&satitle=#{search}&submitsearch=Search”
rss = SimpleRSS.parse open(url)

found_items = rss.items.collect{|item|
prices = item.description.scan(/.*\$(\d+).*<\/strong>/) # find the price for the item
price = prices[0][0].to_i
if price >= lower && price <= upper
item
end
}