Re: Improving gweather

[Kevin Vandersloot <kfv101 psu edu>]

Hey guys.

It seems to me the best and simplest way to do this is to just create
weather.gnome.org and provide our own xml. The guy who did
weather.interceptvector.com even offered the possibility of us using his
code (it's lgpl I think) to produce our own xml.

We would then have the problem of writing the code (or borowing from
interceptvector.com). Current conditions are gotten from noaa in the
current code. Forecasts are gotten from noaa (iwin) only for US sites
and metoffice.gov.uk for UK sites. The current code is a little limited
in that it only parses current data and doesn't really parse forecasts
(which weather.interceptvector does). Also forecasts are not available
for non US,UK sites which makes the applet rather useless for most
places (what's the point of only showing the current conditions?)

So the question becomes, who is willing to do the coding? I don't really
have enough time to tackle this myself.

Regards,
Kevin

On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 13:51, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> Hey,
> 	Its great to see this coming up in discussion. This issue proved to be
> a stopper for Sun shipping gweather and I think the plan was that one of
> us would get around to fixing it "soon".
> 
> On Sat, 2003-03-08 at 06:01, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-03-07 at 11:36, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> > > 
> > > > I'd tend to suggest that we point the applet at an URL we control (say
> > > > weather.gnome.org) and have it expect the XML format.
> > > 
> > > > In any case if we have the applet looking at an URL/format we control we
> > > > can always fix it.
> > > 
> > > It also means that we (and when I say "we" I mean "GNOME's kind web hosting
> > > sponsor, Red Hat") have to fork out the bandwidth fees... Might be an
> > > interesting way to find out how many users we have, though. ;-)
> > 
> > I suspect that an extra level of indirection:
> > 
> >  The weather applet connects to the server and asks for an URL 
> >  to connect to when started. 
> > 
> >  All future attempts go to the redirected URL for some period
> >  of time (or until failure)
> 
> 	Of course, its not just the hard coding of a URL thats a problem.
> Previously, AFAIR, gweather parsed an arbitrarily formatted HTML page
> and now it parses XML. A change in this format will break the applet
> just as much as the URL changing ... I think there's a few options for
> fixing that:
> 
> 	* Mirror the service on gnome.org in our own "standard" format.
> 
> 	or
> 
> 	* Allow the applet to pull from gnome.org both the location of the
> service and enough information to parse the output. Maybe a list of
> XPath paths into the output for each piece of data we use might work,
> maybe we could supply an XSL transform to apply to the ouput and parse
> the result, maybe ... I'll leave that discussion up to people who know
> what they're talking about.
> 
> Good Luck,
> Mark.
> 
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