I apologize for the second update in as many days on the new project, but I wanted to share.
Also, please ignore just about everything in part 17. Most of the URLs are already obsolete.
The first thing to see in Spring 0.2 is the API documentation. This is being generated on the fly based on the actual dispatcher used to process the requests. View the real-time API here:
http://www.unto.net/spring/api/
(I wish I had done this for past projects -- having the documentation for a web services API autogenerated is fantastic. I'll be sure to carry this over to Essex.)
Spring 0.2 now supports OpenSearch queries for Amazon, Yahoo, and Google via their web services. Of the three, Yahoo's web services are probably the easiest to work with. The Yahoo API is both HTTP GET-based and internally consistent. Amazon's is GET-based, but has a long way to go before being internally consistent. Google's is SOAP-based, which is probably more complicated than it needs to be. All three services return results in XML format. Spring translates those results into OpenSearch RSS with XSLT stylesheets. You can view the OpenSearch stylesheets for Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. (You'll need to read some code to see how Spring fetches the results.)
Feel free to try out an Spring OpenSearch query or two:
AJAX on Yahoo
AJAX on Google
AJAX on Amazon
Each of those searches (or ones that you may actually want to use) can be saved in a blogreader. I.e., they are RSS feeds.
I will undoubtably add more OpenSearch engines over time. However, I am limited on the number of queries I can make a day to each service. In particular, if you save Google searches, please use your own Google Web ID, like this:
http://www.unto.net/spring/google/web/opensearch/ajax?GoogleWebId=[your Google Web ID]
Up next, Spring 0.3 -- all of this, tied together with a fancy client-side user-interface.