porting liquid weather to plasma

Matt matt-lists at comnet.net.nz
Sat Mar 1 03:12:39 CET 2008


On Sat, 01 Mar 2008 14:45:51 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 29 February 2008, Matt and Sarah wrote:
> > I'm not sure if I'm going to use that engine, or whether the weather.com
> > xml feed is compatible with a standalone dataengine type set up.  You
> > have to subscribe to the service, and so if I were to write an engine,
> > everyone would be downloading off of my subscription - which would make
> > me nervous about being responsible for abuse - anyway - I'll think on
> > that.
>
> how is that different than accessing the information any other way? i don't
> see the difference, esp since with open source software anyone can use your
> code to build something else with it.
>
> the point of "standalone dataengines" is to be able to share infrastructure
> between applets (even of the same sort) at both development and run time.
>
> even if your weather xml parser sits along side / ships with yoru applet,
> i'd highly recommend considering going the dataengine route.

I can see the benefit of standalone dataengines, and would be happy to 
implement it in this fashion (assuming my coding skills are up to it).  
HOwever, I have a concern about licensing, and whether the data feed is in 
fact compatible with a GPL license.

The xml feed license requires you to use a specific url which contains a key 
that is linked to a subscriber.  There are limitations on how much data you 
can download, and how often.  In addition, in order to use the data feed, 
there are requirements to acknowledge the data source in the applet.  This is 
the bit that I am not sure of whether it would comply with a GPL dataengine.  
I suppose I can implement it in such a way that the user of the engine must 
provide their own "subscription key" part of the url in the applet itself, 
which would probably deal with my concern. 

Now just have to work out how to implement a dataengine and in python.

-- 
Regards

Matt


More information about the Panel-devel mailing list