* Actually, it's Web page scraping
Just when you thought screen scraping was dead along comes Dappit. To be honest it isn’t really screen scrapping, it is more Web page scraping with the ability to export the data in a wide range of formats.
Dappit is a clever idea which the company describes thusly: “For those familiar with Web services, you can think of Dapper as an API maker. For the rest of you, Dapper allows you to build Web applications and mashups using data from any Web site without any programming.”
To use Dappit you start by giving the service either a URL, or multiple URLs. In the former case you then cruise to similar pages and add them to your “basket” – a set of URLs – with Dappit’s virtual browser, a browser within a browser that adds a control bar across the top of the browser pane with “Add to Basket” and “Finish.”
In the next step you are shown the first URL and you select one or more page elements you’re interested in, Dappit highlights all similar areas and each set of areas you click on gets added to the list of Field Elements.
It is important to understand that these elements combined constitute the field you’re defining and not multiple fields – you need to repeat this process to create multiple fields. In this step you can also specify for start and stop character sequences that are to be ignored, and between which is the data you’re interested in.
When you’re done, the next step is to name the field and you can also preview the output. You can continue, or go back and combine separate fields into named groups.
Finally, you can save the fields and associated URL as a “Dapp” giving it a name, a description, and tags as well as being able to specify a variable URL (the variable part you indicate by editing a variable name between braces in the required place in the URL).
You can mark your Dapp as a test and have it automatically deleted after 48 hours, leave it as “private” which means it will be published after 48 hours, or mark it as permanently private.
Once you’re done you can use the Dapp you have created. The page for each Dapp lists the output formats that result from the page scraping. These formats include XML; HTML; JSON; YAML; and RSS. You can also have the Dapp generate an e-mail (Create an Alert); a Google Map; a Google Gadget; an Image Loop; an iCalendar item; or an Email. You even can run the Dapp output through an XSL Transform, or link it to another Dapp for further scraping.
I created a Dapp that goes to the online White Pages with first, last, city, and state as variables that returns nothing but the name, address and telephone number. I now need to create another Dapp to give me a version without the phone numbers (which aren’t separated from the address) and then by using the Google Maps format as the output I can plot the locations of the people returned by the search.
This is a groundbreaking services. It takes a little work to understand, but after that it is fairly easy to use. If you create a Dapp let me know.
