IRC Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 57 Search for Books on Amazon

With the Amazon Web Services
Developer's Kit, perform keyword searches and return
the results to IRC.

After familiarizing yourself with the
previous hacks, you should be well aware of the power of Web
Services. Amazon provides a Web
Services Developer's Kit, available from http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landingl.
You can download this for free and use it to search Amazon for books
or other items. To use it from a Java program, you will also need to
download the Apache Axis SOAP
implementation from http://ws.apache.org/axis.

When you have installed Axis and Amazon Web Services, you can choose
to either use Amazon's WSDL directly or use the more
friendly com.amazon.soap.axis package. This hack
will show you how to use this package to search for books on Amazon.

Amazon doesn't provide a Java package to use their
Web Services, so you must generate the
com.amazon.soap.axis package yourself. To do this,
you must download the Amazon Web Services WSDL file from
http://soap.amazon.com/schemas2/AmazonWebServices.wsdl.
Now change to the
kit/AmazonWebServices/JavaCodeSample directory
and execute the client.axis.sh or
client.axis.bat script. This will automatically
generate the package for you. Make sure all of the
JAR files in axis/lib are
included in your classpath, along with your new
com.amazon.soap.axis package and
pircbot.jar.

The IRC bot described in this hack will respond to the
!amazon command and use any parameters as keywords
when performing a search of Amazon's books. The top
three results, if any, will then be returned to the channel.

8.8.1 The Code

Save the following as
AmazonBot.java
:

import java.net.*;
import com.amazon.soap.axis.*;
import org.jibble.pircbot.*;
public class AmazonBot extends PircBot {
private AmazonSearchService service = new AmazonSearchServiceLocator( );
public AmazonBot(String name) {
setName(name);
}
public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login,
String hostname, String message) {
message = message.trim( );
String[] parts = message.split("\\s+", 2);
// Check for the !amazon command and keywords.
if (parts.length == 2 && parts[0].toLowerCase( ).equals("!amazon")) {
String keywords = parts[1];
String results = getBooks(keywords);
if (results == null) {
results = "Cannot find any matches.";
}
// Send the results back to the channel.
sendMessage(channel, results);
}
}
public String getBooks(String keywords) {
String topMatches = "Top matches:";
try {
AmazonSearchPort port = service.getAmazonSearchPort( );
KeywordRequest request = new KeywordRequest( );
request.setKeyword(URLEncoder.encode(keywords, "utf-8"));
// Search only for books.
request.setMode("books");
request.setType("lite");
ProductInfo results = port.keywordSearchRequest(request);
Details[] details = results.getDetails( );
for (int i = 0; i < details.length && i < 3; i++) {
Details current = details[i];
topMatches += " " + Colors.BOLD + (i + 1) + ". " + 
Colors.NORMAL + current.getProductName( );
// If the book has an author, include it in brackets.
if (current.getAuthors( ) != null) {
topMatches += " (" + current.getAuthors( )[0] + ")";
}
}
}
catch (Exception e) {
return null;
}
return topMatches;
}
}

Now create a main method in
AmazonBotMain.java
to launch the bot:

public class AmazonBotMain {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
AmazonBot bot = new AmazonBot("AmazonBot");
bot.setVerbose(true);
bot.connect("irc.freenode.net");
bot.joinChannel("#irchacks");
}
}

8.8.2 Running the Hack

To compile the bot, you will need to have
the Axis JAR files in your classpath, along with
pircbot.jar. The
com.amazon.soap.axis hierarchy can be placed in
the current directory, so you won't have to
explicitly include it in the classpath.

You can add the relevant entries to your system classpath or specify
them on the command line when you compile the bot, for example:

% javac -classpath .:pircbot.jar:axis-1_1/lib/axis.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/axis-ant.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/commons-discovery.jar:axis-1_1/lib/commons-logging.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/jaxrpc.jar:axis-1_1/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar:axis-1_1/lib/saaj.jar:\
axis-1_1/lib/wsdl4j.jar *.java

You can then run the bot like so:

% java -classpath .:pircbot.jar:axis-1_1/lib/axis.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/axis-ant.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/commons-discovery.jar:axis-1_1/lib/commons-logging.jar: \
axis-1_1/lib/jaxrpc.jar:axis-1_1/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar:axis-1_1/lib/saaj.jar:\
axis-1_1/lib/wsdl4j.jar AmazonBotMain

8.8.3 Using the Bot

As soon as the bot joins your channel, it is
ready to start looking up books on Amazon. You can pass whatever
keywords you want to it, including parts of the title or even the
name of an author. Only the first three results will be shown, for
example:

<Jibbler> !amazon hacks
<AmazonBot> Top matches: 1. Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
(Tara Calishain) 2. The Hack Counter-Hack Training Course: A Desktop Seminar from 
Ed Skoudis, with Video (Edward Skoudis) 3. eBay Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and 
Tools (David A. Karp)

Here is another example, which returns three books by the author Eric
Dymock:

<Jibbler> !amazon eric dymock
<AmazonBot> Top matches: 1. The Audi File: All Models Since 1888 
(Eric Dymock) 2. Jim Clark: Racing Legend (Eric Dymock) 3. The Renault File: All Models 
Since 1898 (An Eric Dymock Motor Book) (Eric Dymock)

If the bot cannot find any results at all, it will let you know that
it could not find any matches.

8.8.4 Hacking the Hack

At the moment, the bot uses the getProductName and
getAuthors methods to display the name of each
book and the first author when it displays the results of each
search. There are several other methods in the
Details
class that you may like to include in
your results. Here are some of the most useful ones:

getIsbn

Returns the ISBN for the book. This is a unique identifier and can be
used to look up the same product at a later date.

getAgeGroup

If your IRC channel is designed for use by youngsters, you can use
this method to determine whether each search result is suitable for
them.

getImageUrlLarge

Returns a URL pointing to a large image of the book.

getListPrice

Shows the list price for the book.

getOurPrice

Shows the price of the book on Amazon.

getSalesRank

Shows how popular the book is (a lower value means it is more
popular).

Using the getListPrice method, you can add prices
to your results. For example:

<Jibbler> !amazon irc hacks
<AmazonBot> Top matches: 1. $24.95 IRC Hacks (Paul Mutton)

Amazon Web Services provide an easy way to get information from the
Amazon web site. Without these, making such a bot would have been
much more

complicated.