[mythtv-users] Plugin Suggestion

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Jun 08, 2008 at 01:32:55PM -0400, Adam Stylinski wrote:
>    Last night I had the desire to order pizza but didn't want to pick
>    up a phone. I visited [1]papajohns.com from mythbrowser, only to
>    find it was a very limited browser (javascript is disabled). I
>    resorted to making my .xinitrc start opera with evilwm instead
>    of mythtv for the time being, but the idea suddenly occurred to
>    me. We have all seen the perl script "pizza-party" which allows
>    you to order from dominos with your account information on their
>    website. What if somebody (and I'm no CGI/Perl wiz, this is why I'm
>    suggesting it) wrote a mythplugin which allowed you to configure
>    it to a specific account for different pizza places? There is
>    currently one which displays movie times in a similar manner. This
>    script should allow you to do everything the webpages do (including
>    using a payment standard other than the default one). Anyway, this
>    is just a suggestion.

As someone who orders fairly frequently from both PH and PJ's online,
I'm sympathetic to your cause, but I don't think it would work all that
well in practice, for two reasons:

1)	Doing that sort of thing reliably requires an API interface
	from the provider; if you don't have one, they're *guaranteed*
	to change the interface you're scraping to suit themselves,
	oftentimes fairly frequently.

	If you're hitting them from a centralized place, chasing after
	it is probably both practical and worthwhile. If a billion and
	6 copies of a doenloaded plugin have to chase them... not so
	much.

2)	Both providers tend to add fairly useful functionality to their
	Web UI's on a faily regular basis (and lately, neither of them
	has broken anything I like), so not only do you have to worry
	about chasing the base functionality, you either have to chase
	the extended functions as well, or deny them to your users.

My thought is that it's not all that hard (though it's probably
"breaking the rules" to do it outside Myth :-) to just fire up firefox
-- and it seems to work fine with both sites, though it didn't
originally.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274

	     Those who cast the vote decide nothing.
	     Those who count the vote decide everything.
	       -- (Joseph Stalin)